


Forget Me Not

by maisierita



Category: SGA - Fandom
Genre: Alien Jail, Amnesia, M/M, Or is it amnesia?, repost, servant - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-11 06:21:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3317363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maisierita/pseuds/maisierita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>John the servant turns out not to be anything like Rodney would have imagined.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Repost from 2008! Will be bringing some stories over from Live Journal as time permits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Being a convicted criminal, Rodney thinks, has not really turned out to be all that bad. He's got his own small apartment which locks from the inside, a private lavatory with bathing facilities, a mattress which doesn't hurt his back, and three meals a day, plus snacks. The work he's doing is challenging, and interesting enough that he doesn't always want to leave when it's time for meals or exercise or rest, and the other prisoners he's living and working with are a lot like him: brainy and non-violent. It's not really a bad life, all in all.

Although this is a new wrinkle he hadn't expected, 'this' being the servant he has somehow earned. "I don't understand," he says helplessly to Raku, who is gazing at him with a placid, pleasant expression. "I haven't even been here that long."

"Nearly three seasons," Raku says. "And your progress has been excellent. The council is most pleased with your work. You have earned this, Rodney. You should be honored."

"But ..." Rodney waves his hand around at his small quarters. "What will he do?"

"Tend to you," Raku says. He looks bemused. "Fetch your meals, clean your rooms, do your washing. Anything else you can think of that you do not wish to do yourself." He crosses his hands behind his back, looks grave. "This is not just for you, Rodney. It is an opportunity for him as well. He has been in the mines."

"Oh." The prisoners in the mines don't have half the amenities the Class Fives do. Manual labor, cramped quarters, no recreation time—they're the violent offenders, the ones that can't be easily controlled even after Treatment.

"Don't worry," Raku says. "He had a rough time of it, but his behavior has much improved in the past month. You will not be in any danger. And if he does relapse, you will have this." He hands Rodney a slim, small metal device.

Rodney takes it with a small frown of distaste. "Isn't this a subduer?"

"A personal one," Raku says. "Keyed specifically to his implant, and incapable of causing severe harm."

Rodney turns it over and over in his hand. "I still don't think I'd be comfortable using it."

"It is only for emergencies, if he should become violent or dangerous. We do not believe it will be necessary, but we prefer to have the safety precaution in place. Its use will be monitored to ensure that you are not abusing your position, not that I expect that to be an issue with you."

"Okay," Rodney says, because really, he does not have much of a choice here. They give him the trappings of freedom but he is just as much a prisoner as this new servant is. He sticks the device in his pocket. "Maybe he can help me with my work."

"I don't think you will find him suited for that," Raku says noncommittally, turning to leave. "But he should serve you well enough here." He pauses at the door. "It is only temporary, Rodney. A season, maybe two. If he does well here, he may be promoted to Class Three."

Class Three, Rodney knows, is where life begins to get bearable: semi-private rooms in comfortable dorms, personal lavatory cubicles instead of communal showers, recreation facilities that offer enjoyment as well as exercise. He's heard the Class Twos will work themselves into the ground trying to get promoted. It's sort of unsettling to think of himself as the hurdle this other person needs to get past. Rodney wonders if he's ever had a servant before. Going by the queasiness in his stomach, he doesn't think so.

"What kind of name is John, anyway?" he blurts out. "I've never heard of it."

"And you have heard all possible names in your time here?" Raku asks with a small smile.

"Well, no. Obviously not. But it's different."

"It's not common," Raku concedes. "But then again, neither is your name."

"At least mine has two syllables."

"I hope," Raku says dryly, "that you will give him a chance here, despite the oddity of his name."

Grumpy now, Rodney says, "It's not like I have a choice."

"No," Raku says blithely as he leaves. "You do not."

~~

John the servant turns out not to be anything like Rodney would have imagined. He's tall and thin, with fading bruises on his face Rodney knows better than to ask about, and the slightly perplexed expression Rodney's come to associate with people who've recently been Treated, even though Raku says it's been over a month.

Predictably, on the day John is due to start work, Rodney gets stuck in the lab and gets home later than usual; his first clue that John's arrived is when he walks through the door and sees that his apartment, which he had always assumed was too small to get messy, is unrecognizably immaculate.

"Hello?" he calls out uncertainly. He fumbles for the control device Raku gave him. He doesn't want to use it—ever, really—but if its purpose is to serve as a deterrent, John needs to know he has it so it can, presumably, deter him.

A man emerges from the bathroom, a dirty rag in one hand and a bottle of cleaning solution in the other. He dips his head deferentially. "Are you Rodney? I'm John." Then he looks up a little hesitantly, gripping the rag so hard his fingers turn white. "Raku let me in. You weren't here."

"No," Rodney says. "No, I wasn't. I was working late. I do that a lot. It's, uh ... you'll have to expect that. So." He waves his hand in general at the apartment. "You cleaned."

John looks panicked for a second, and Rodney realizes with amazement that John is by far the more nervous one here. That he is making John nervous. Rodney's never been in that sort of position of power before. At least, he doesn't think so. Anything could have been possible before he came here, but speculating about the infinite possibilities of his past existence is one sure way to speed the pace at which he's heading for a nervous breakdown, so Rodney, in general, prefers to assume his life before incarceration was pretty much the same as it is now, at least in all the significant ways that don't have to do with being locked up and having no memory.

"Yes," John says, swallowing hard, like cleaning is potentially a really bad thing for him to have done. "Raku said I was supposed to ... I mean, he said that it's part of my responsibilities here, and I just thought since you weren't here to tell me what to do, I should start with that. I didn't move anything around, or anything. I dusted."

There is something very unnatural about the rapid stream of words coming from John's mouth, and something more unnatural still about John's hesitant, diffident manner. Rodney wonders if it's a side effect of Treatment, if John was so violent before that eliminating those facets of his personality has changed him in some very fundamental manner, so much that even Rodney can tell. It's as if John's wearing this personality like a suit of clothing that doesn't fit, obvious even to a casual observer. Then Rodney thinks he's probably just being ridiculous.

"It's fine," Rodney says. He slips the controller back in his pocket. If its primary function is to serve as a deterrent, it will apparently be useless, because if John is deterred any more, he might not be able to function. "It looks good in here. I guess I didn't realize how dirty it had gotten."

"I've seen worse," John says.

Since John can only possibly be referencing the mines, Rodney is sure that is true, though it's also quite possibly nothing more than an attempt at obsequiousness. He goes into his bedroom and sees that the bed's been made as well. The covers are straight and flat, like they've been ironed; the corners are perfectly square. He's almost afraid to touch it and mess it up. He settles for running his fingers lightly over the comforter. "Wow," he says, with unfeigned admiration. "That's impressive. Where'd you learn that?"

It is a stupid question, which he realizes as soon as it's out of his mouth. John just shrugs and does not point out Rodney's obvious idiocy. "I don't know. It's just how I make my bed." He grins, which makes him look less dazed and nervous, but also highlights the bruises around his mouth. "Maybe I worked in a hotel before."

Somehow, Rodney doubts it.

~~

Rodney's class and ranking award him home cooking privileges for five meals out of every ten. He rarely takes advantage of it because it's easier to go to the commissary, even if there is less choice there. But John seems eager to cook for him, so Rodney sends him off to get supplies, with a signed requisition slip and detailed instructions on which ingredients to avoid, "because it would be tragic if I died of anaphylactic shock on your first day here."

When John doesn't make it back in what Rodney considers to be a reasonable amount of time, he goes looking for him. He is expecting a long, possibly traumatic search (his mind has already conjured the many terrible things that could have happened to a recently Treated Class Two on the way to and from the Class Five commissary), so he's a little taken aback to find John before he's even left the building. John is hovering in the foyer of the apartment building, two bags of supplies clenched tightly in his fists, and he is staring perplexedly at the board with the resident inmates' names listed on it.

"What happened? Did you get lost?" Rodney grabs one of the bags of food from John's unresisting hand. "I was about to call security."

"Sorry," John says. He looks uncomfortable, and follows Rodney up the stairs. "I forgot which apartment you lived in."

"Third four, southwest corner," Rodney says. "Which is listed right next to my name on the board."

"Yeah," John says. "I was just looking at that. I'd have been up in a minute." Then they get inside and John brightens. "Hey, they had real meat!"

"It's Fourth Day. We always have meat on Fourth Day. Bisa steaks or livian patties, usually. Didn't you have meat, uh, before?" This is Rodney's attempt at being tactful. It's unclear to him if it is okay to talk about what life was like in the mines. Rodney has no factual information about the mines at all, just supposition and rumor that is occasionally bandied about the lab, but he guesses it's kind of like being in prison in the first place, only worse; not something you really want to talk about to people who haven't experienced it themselves.

"No." John doesn't seem particularly upset at the oblique reference to the mines. He's unloading the meat—bisa steaks, Rodney sees, but big ones, thick and bloody, still attached to the bone. "Not real meat, anyway. Oola stew, sometimes, but Bolu—he shared my cot—he told me that it wasn't real meat, just the parts of the animal you'd never actually eat." He loads the steaks into a pan Rodney didn't even know he had, and starts opening jar after jar of spices, sniffing each one in turn. "I can't remember the last time I had real meat."

He says that without irony, which Rodney thinks is pretty impressive, considering.

~~

John hums to himself while he's cooking. Rodney finds this very disconcerting, not at all fitting with his mental image of what a violent offender should be like, even one who has had the violent parts of his personality deactivated. Soon there is steak, and salad, and some sort of chewy grain. At the first bite, Rodney decides that this servant business will work out fine after all.

They are sitting together at Rodney's small dining table, which John had protested but Rodney had insisted upon. "It's bad enough," he had said, "that I have to have a servant. I'm not going to compound it by making you eat by yourself off in a corner somewhere."

"Bad enough?" John had repeated. He lifted one eyebrow way, way up. "Isn't it a huge status symbol? I though most Class Fives wanted servants."

"I am not most people. Anyway," Rodney had added, "I don't have another table." Which had pretty much been the end of the debate.

The meal is amazing. Rodney has never much liked the food here, though it hasn't stopped him from eating it. He'd assumed that the slightly unpleasant cuisine was part and parcel of being incarcerated; after all, if everything was so great inside the prison, everyone would be breaking the law to get in. Now he's wondering if it's maybe just the fault of the prisoners they've got assigned to commissary duty, even though, in theory, they've been assigned there on the basis of proclivity and aptitude. He's not sure what it is, exactly, but from the first meal he had here, the food's just tasted wrong, overspiced or underspiced or just wrongly spiced. This though, is just right, and he doesn't know if it's fluke (which would be sad) or if John's a culinary genius (which would be great).

"This is amazing," he says around a mouthful of steak.

John looks up, and he's got a strange, pensive expression on his face as he chews. "I didn't realize how awful the food was in the mines until now. If people knew what you get to eat in the upper classes, they'd be rioting."

"The food can't be the worst of it," Rodney says reasonably. "I don't think anybody would riot just for bisa steaks."

"You've obviously never eaten oola stew," John says, and since this is true so far as Rodney can recall, he lets the matter drop.

~~

It's quite late when they finish eating, past the point when Rodney's usually in bed, if he's not at the labs. Socializing after working hours is tolerated within certain strict limits, but Rodney doesn't often take advantage of it. He's friendly enough with the people in his lab, but doesn't feel any particular need to spend additional time with them after hours.

John insists on doing all the cleaning. "It's my job," he says, brow furrowed. "That's why I'm here." Rodney lets him because, even in four hours, he can tell how important it is to John that he is useful, that he does a good job at this. It makes Rodney feel superfluous in his own apartment, having someone else washing dishes and sweeping his floor (not that he sweeps his floor very often on his own), but because for John, it's either this or the mines, Rodney lets him take care of everything. He wanders around a little aimlessly, fingering the books he's been allotted but has never bothered to read. Then he spots an unfamiliar bag placed inconspicuously in the corner, and wanders back into the kitchen where John is drying the dishes with a dishtowel Rodney had no idea he owned.

"I saw your bag," he says to John's back.

John's muscles tense, and he turns around slowly, wearing a guarded expression and keeping his eyes glued to some place just above and to the right of Rodney's head. "It's just a couple of changes of clothing," he says defensively. "I didn't bring anything I wouldn't need. It won't get in your way."

"Hey," Rodney says, hands up to placate. John's slightly off-center stare is unnerving and strange. "It's not a big deal. I just wasn't thinking ..." He trails off, thinking things through a little bit. "I need to find you a place to sleep." This shouldn't be as startling as it is. Raku had told him, after all; he'd known that John as a Class Two didn't qualify for dormitory housing. It's just that he hadn't really considered that having a servant also meant having a roommate.

"I don't have to stay here. I just thought it'd be easier if I were here when you woke up, so I could get your breakfast for you, prepare your clothes ...." John shrugs like it doesn't matter. "I doubt Bolu's found anybody to share the cot yet. He doesn't speak to most of the day-shifters, and we didn't really have all that great of a location. I can always go back to the mines to sleep. I could get one of the guards to wake me early. Transports start at 400."

Rodney's a lot more horrified at the idea than he thinks he should be, considering he's just met John this afternoon, but he is not going to be the one responsible for sending anybody to the mines, even if it's only for sleeping. "No," he says firmly. "No. You'll sleep here. I can make up the couch."

John turns and looks at the couch, which is probably half as long as it would need to be for John to sleep comfortably on it. "I'll just sleep on the floor. I don't mind."

And that's what they end up doing, because Rodney's bed is not big enough to share (not that John would share, anyway; it's pretty clear that he has fixed ideas of what's appropriate, and bed-sharing probably wouldn't qualify), and he doesn't have guest furniture. He wonders what his other colleagues do; a couple of the people in the science department have qualified for servants, and he doubts their apartments are any bigger than his. He guesses he will ask tomorrow. For now, he pulls his extra blanket out of the closet and folds up a towel to serve as a pillow.

"It's fine," John insists. He turned down the sheets on Rodney's bed, and is hovering at the door to Rodney's bedroom now, holding the blanket in one hand. He doesn't seem at all upset at the prospect of sleeping on the floor. If anything, he is disconcerted at Rodney's discomfort. "I'll wrap it around me like a sleeping bag. It'll be better than the cot. No bugs."

"Bugs!" Rodney's horrified again. "Do you ... I mean, are you ..."

"No." John looks amused. Sort of. "They deloused me this morning. I'm clean as can be."

"Oh," Rodney says. "Good. How about-"

"They sterilized my clothing too. Don't worry."

Rodney thinks he'll stop by to see the quartermaster in the morning and get some bug spray, just in case.

~~

John's already in the kitchen when Rodney wakes up the next morning, and there is a heavenly smell wafting through the apartment. "What," Rodney says, "is that?"

John turns around and smiles. "Something called tava beans. The quartermaster was trying to get rid of them yesterday, so I got them cheap. They're not good for eating, but I had this idea of brewing them up, like a tea."

"Yes, okay," Rodney says desperately. "Please tell me you're done brewing them now."

"Here." John hands him a mug, and it is like a little sip of paradise in a cup. "Oh, my god," Rodney moans. "I missed this." And then he freezes, because he knows he's never had it before, but the certainty that he _has_ is sudden and unshakeable. It's an itch he can't scratch, something just visible out of the corner of his eye, gone when he grabs for it.

"They cost next to nothing," John says blithely. He's at the stove, busy with some kind of egg concoction, and he doesn't seem to have noticed Rodney's little epiphany. "Maybe a twentieth of your weekly rations for a huge bag. You can have it every day, if you like."

"I think," Rodney says slowly, "that I just remembered something." Because it is important enough to mention, he thinks, more important than anything else they could be discussing.

"Oh?" John turns around, a big fork in his hand. It's covered with half-cooked egg and a red vegetable of some sort. "Are you late for work? I thought you didn't have to be there until 750." He frowns speculatively at the fork. "I can give you some omelet to take with you. I don't know how well it will travel, though."

"No," Rodney says. "I remembered something from before."

John freezes, omelet forgotten now. "You—is that even possible? They told me Treatment was permanent."

"Me too." Rodney strains for it, but it's just out of reach, a vague evocation of taste and smell, someone laughing off to one side, a hot mug clenched tightly in one hand.

"Don't tell anyone." John's face is pale, his hand white-knuckled on the fork. "If they know, they might Treat you again, and you'll lose everything."

Rodney tilts his head to one side, studying him. "Is that what they did to you?"

John laughs a little helplessly. "I don't know. I can't remember." He chews at his lips, looks nervously at Rodney, like he's telling him a dangerous secret. Rodney wonders why John would trust him with any kind of confidence so soon after they've met; maybe it's the same reason he's already done the same himself. "Bolu said I'd been in the mines for two full seasons."

Rodney feels a chill. "You don't remember?"

"I only remember the past month. And Jeznel—she's one of the trusties there—she says I came from the quarry before that. But Bolu says I never mentioned it, not once. And I would have, wouldn't I? If I'd remembered?"

"But that means you've had three Treatments," Rodney says. "One after you were convicted, one when you left the quarry, one in the mines. At least three. Why would they do that?"

"People try to escape sometimes," John says. "Especially from the mines, because they're so close to the fence. I think they Treat them when they catch them."

To Rodney, attempting escape is unfathomable. He doesn't know what's beyond the fence, except they talk about monsters out there, creatures that can suck your life right out of your body, how there's no protection outside the penal colony. Rodney doesn't remember having a life to go back to, and apparently he wasn't living it very well anyway, if it ended up getting him convicted and exiled, so he's never felt much of an urge to leave. "You think you tried to escape?"

"Maybe," John says uneasily. He turns back to the stove, poking listlessly at the pan. "It was stupid, if that's what I did. Treatment messes you up."

Rodney waits a minute for clarification, but John doesn't seem to want to say any more. He turns around instead and gestures at the table. "The omelet's ready, if you're hungry."

"I have no idea what an omelet is," Rodney says. "But I'm always hungry."

John laughs, and it sounds mostly genuine. "I'll keep that in mind."

It hits Rodney at that moment for the first time (though it will not be the last) just how handsome John is. Maybe, Rodney thinks, the smell of roasted tava is clouding his judgment, but standing there laughing, hair still tousled from sleep, face covered in swaths of stubble, sleep shirt open at the neck, John is unreasonably, inhumanly attractive. It makes Rodney nervous, because there is a part of him that is already claiming, _Mine!_ Rodney considers this a very dangerous thing to be thinking about a servant, no matter how good he looks in the morning. So Rodney takes a big sip of tava to distract himself, which works fairly well because, oh my god, _good_. Then John gives him his omelet, which is even better, and Rodney forgets all about how good looking John is. At least for the moment.

~~

Later, when Rodney's ready to leave for work, he's casting his eyes all over his apartment. For the life of him, he can't think what John's going to do all day. It seems to him that this plan of his having a servant was not especially well thought out on someone's part.

"Laundry," John says. "And your rugs could use cleaning."

"Okay, realistically," Rodney says, "you could clean this apartment for a day or two, but then it will be cleaner than it was when I moved in. You can't cook for me all day; I don't have the rations for that, especially if we're both eating here."

"I can eat in the commissary," John says. "I've got a temporary pass. It's got to be better than the food in the mines."

"That's not the point." Rodney sighs. "Look, the fact of the matter is, I'm one man with a couple of rooms, and I only eat half my meals at home. I don't really need a servant all the time. Honestly, what are you going to do? You can't keep cleaning the bathroom."

"If you don't have enough work for me," John says, "I'm supposed to go back to the mines."

"What? No, no, no. That is a bad idea. You just _left_ the mines."

"I don't mean going back permanently," John says. "Just until you get home. It's okay," he adds, apparently at seeing the (presumably horrified) look on Rodney's face. "I don't mind."

"I'd rather it didn't come to that," Rodney says grumpily. It bothers him that he is somehow managing to fail at this master business, and it hasn't even been a full day.

John just shrugs. "Hey, from where I'm standing, this is a big improvement."

~~

Two nights later, Rodney comes home and John is not there. Rodney does not panic, because John is an adult and he has already proved to be reasonably intelligent. Rodney usually gets home later than this, so John is probably just out buying food for dinner. But an hour later, John still has not arrived. Rodney calls Raku in a panic.

"Did he go back to the mines?" Rodney says. He is just a little bit hysterical. "It's not safe there. He's told me stories. Is he hurt? Oh god, is he dead? I could have given him more laundry!"

John is not dead. John appears fifteen minutes later, holding bags of food and looking sheepish, escorted by a security guard who does not acknowledge either of them.

"What happened?" Rodney screeches in a manly, dignified manner. "I thought you went back to the mines and they wouldn't let you back out." He doesn't mention the fact that he'd actually been worrying that John was dead. He thinks it's possible that that's a little bit neurotic.

"I did go back to the mines," John says. "For an hour. Maybe two, tops. Bolu found someone else to share the cot already. Some guy from the fourth level moved up. But they have to let me back out. I have a pass." He holds up the shiny card that's on a chain around his neck. It's got his unsmiling picture on it, grainy and grim, and some annotation affording John the travel privileges of a Class Three.

"So, what? You lost track of time? Because I know I'm a little lax with the whole servant-master relationship, and it's not like I actually _need_ you to cook me dinner, but I was expecting you to be here when I got home, and you weren't. I have a very overactive imagination, and in my head you were cold and lying on a slab somewhere waiting to be autopsied." And okay, the neurosis just slipped out. His verbal filters are somewhat lax. He likes to think this is a side effect of Treatment, even though no one else he's met in the compound suffers from the same affliction.

John blinks. "Okay," he says. "Next time I'll leave a note. It's just, I kind of got lost, and none of the security guards would even talk to me so I was kind of wandering around hoping I'd find the right building."

Rodney stares at him. "You can't ..." he says, floundering. "You can't get lost here. It's not a real city. Everything's numbered. In order."

"Yeah," John says. His face is flushed, color high in his cheeks, and he is looking everywhere but at Rodney. "I couldn't remember which building you live in." ("You live in", Rodney notes distractedly, not "we live in," and that says something significant, though he is not exactly sure what, but it is something he is going to ponder later, when John has gone to bed and Rodney is alone in his room and can think about it in private.) "I should have written it down, but I made it back okay the other night when I went to the commissary and I figured I'd be all right."

"But you weren't all right," Rodney says. "And you weren't all right the other night either, come to think of it. It took you an hour to get to the quartermaster's and back, which is ridiculous, especially because you had a map and I know you know how to read one. How long were you waiting down by the door, anyway, before I came and got you?"

"A few minutes," John says defensively. "I told you, I forgot the apartment number."

"My apartment number is on the board right next to my name." Rodney stares at him. "Which means you forgot my _name_. Do you know it now? What is it?"

"Rodney," John says with a sigh. "Your name is Rodney."

"Fine, but that doesn't prove anything," Rodney scoffs. "You've had days to learn it. The question is, did you know it the other night? Because either you forgot it then or you can't read, and I'm pretty sure I've seen you reading."

John frowns sullenly. "I can read."

"You just can't remember anything. Worse than the rest of us, I mean."

"I remember that I work for you, and that you can't eat citrus," John says. He is scowling, and shoulders past Rodney to get to the kitchen. Physical contact of that sort, Rodney thinks, was not foreseen in the servant rulebook, but he has already learned that John only follows the rules he likes. "The rest doesn't really matter."

~~

Rodney does some surreptitious reading over the next few weeks. "Well," he says one night, waiting in the kitchen for John to finish preparing dessert—"It's called ice cream," John says. "You'll love it."—"They're selectively disconnecting certain neural pathways."

"Who is?" John asks. He puts a bowl in front of Rodney and hands him a spoon. "Watch it, it's cold. Be careful of your tooth."

Rodney scowls at him. "I thought servants were supposed to be more deferential, and not so much with the nagging."

"I tried being deferential," John says, "but you didn't seem to like it. And you need the nagging."

Rodney takes a bite of the ice cream and instantly forgives John his lack of deference. "This is incredible."

John beams at him. "Can you believe I tested this out on Jeznel, and she didn't like it? Said it was too sweet."

"Jeznel. That's the woman from the mines? Likes oola stew? Obviously she has no taste." (John snuck a portion of oola stew back one day, just to prove to Rodney it was really as bad as he claimed. It was, Rodney decided, even worse than that, and he resolves never ever to let John do anything that will cause him to get sent back to the mines for long enough to have to eat a meal.) He points to a paragraph in the report he's reading. "This," he says, with a mouthful of ice cream, "explains why your short-term memory is impaired."

"My short-term memory is impaired?" John says, deadpan. "I don't remember that."

Rodney ignores him. "I mean, they're going into your brain and physically severing the connections. Cut enough of them and you're going to get serious side effects."

"At least I can still cook. Can the damage be repaired?"

"Their literature says no," Rodney says. He's a bit skeptical. "I'm no doctor, but it seems to me that the information is still there, somewhere."

"Sure. You remembered something," John points out.

"Just once," Rodney says. "And it wasn't even a real memory."

"It was better than nothing," John says. To Rodney, he sounds hopeful.

~~

Rodney wonders about the pattern of John's days sometimes, what he does to fill the hours that aren't taken up with all the things he does for Rodney.

"I've been working on these," John says when Rodney finally works up the nerve to ask (and yes, Rodney is fully self-aware enough to recognize the significant self-esteem issue implied by the fact that he has to work up the nerve to ask his servant a question). John pulls out a pair of wooden rods from behind the couch, and holds them up for scrutiny, a little guiltily. "I carved them from scrap wood the quartermaster had lying around. They're taking longer than I thought."

"They're very nice," Rodney says, managing to be both sincere and insincere at the same time, because the wood is lovely, and the rods have been carefully whittled into shape, and they will be flawless when polished, but still. They are wooden sticks. "What are they, exactly?"

"I'm not really sure," John says curiously. He grips one stick in his hand, swings it tentatively through the air. "But I've got some ideas."

A few days later when Rodney comes home, the sticks are propped up in corner of the living room, treated with oil and gleaming. Rodney wonders if John has figured out what they are for.

"Maybe," John says. He picks them up and holds them as he runs through a series of movements, slow and lithe and graceful, beautiful enough to cause something to twist painfully in Rodney's chest.

"It's some kind of exercise," John says breathlessly. "The weird thing is, if I think about it, I can't do it." Just to prove his point, maybe, he twirls the rod and makes a misstep, obvious even to Rodney who has no idea at all what John is supposed to be doing, and suddenly it's not graceful at all, it's awkward and lumbering, and John nearly ends up on his ass.

"Something sort of like that, anyway," John says ruefully. He bends over to pick up the stick from the floor, and caresses the wood speculatively with his fingers. "It's like my body remembers this, even though my brain doesn't."

"Muscle memory," Rodney says sagely, and then he adds, "You didn't tell anyone else about this, did you?"

John gives him a look of extreme exasperation that is very un-servant-like. "I'm not an idiot, Rodney."

"No," Rodney says, "I know you're not."

~~

"Prime," John says, sounding bored. "This is a stupid game."

"Humor me," Rodney says.

"Yes, master," John says. "Ten."

"Don't," Rodney says, "screw around."

"Who cares if it's prime or not?" John says irritably. "I don't see the entertainment value. Where did you learn this game, anyway? Did Kelji teach it to you? You told me he was a moron."

"Everyone I work with is a moron. And nobody taught it to me," Rodney says. "Just like nobody taught you to make ice cream, or how to do those exercises you do with the sticks. I think we're remembering things."

John doesn't seem too interested. "If we are," he says, "it seems like it's only the useless stuff. Except for the ice cream."

"But it's something," Rodney says. "It's better than nothing. Nobody else I've spoken to can remember a thing."

"Or else they're smart enough not to admit it if they are," John says with a scowl.

"I thought you wanted to remember things."

"I do," John says. "But useful things, like who we are, and where we come from."

"I know who I am," Rodney says.

"You don't even know if Rodney's your real name," John says, and stalks out of the kitchen.

~~

The first time Rodney kisses John is a Sixth Day towards the end of the season. Rodney's recently been upranked to third, which means he gets an extra half day off every other week, the rights to an additional meal each week at home, and a small increase in his weekly rations. They are celebrating with a meal of livian patties, served John's way: reground and mixed with spices, shaped back into patties and broiled, then served between two thick slices of toasted bread. Each bite is a little taste of a home that Rodney can't remember but now knows he's lost, and after the plates are cleared Rodney pushes John up against the sink and kisses him hard.

"Finally," John says breathlessly, and kisses him back, which is a relief that eases an ache in his chest Rodney didn't even know he had.

Kissing John is familiar and exotic all at the same time. Rodney is sure he's kissed people before, and if the way his body is responding is any indication, at least some of them have been men, but the thing is, he can't _remember_ kissing anybody else. He's—god, he wants to take it slow, to make it count, because if there is nothing else good that comes from Treatment, he gets to be a virgin all over again, and he wants to make this first time memorable. Except his body is not with the program; his body wants this fast and hard and _now_ , and does not appear inclined to take it slow and allow the leisurely, lingering exploration he sort of wants.

John is pushy and demanding, hungry and aggressive. He wrangles Rodney out of the kitchen and into bed in a manner that's not very servant-like at all.

This thought makes Rodney freeze, and he glances down at John's back, all tight, corded muscle, glistening with sweat and trembling. "John," Rodney says, voice cracking, "you're not doing this because you're my servant and you think you have to, are you?"

"Fuck," John grinds out, which means— _something_ , Rodney knows. It means something, even if he can't remember what. John is panting, chest heaving irregularly, and he surely doesn't seem to be acting under duress. "Are you kidding me? Can we talk about this later?"

"No," Rodney says, "no, we really can't. John, I have to know. It's important."

John groans, and twists out from under him, rolling over onto his back. He flops back on the bed and throws an arm over his eyes. "No," John says. He speaks very slowly and distinctly. "I am not doing this because I have to."

"But you would, wouldn't you? If I wanted it, and you didn't."

John sighs. "Yes, Rodney. It's part of the deal. You're Class Five, I'm Class Two. You've got privileges I don't. I'm assigned to work for you. If you ask for something within reason, I'm supposed to give it to you."

"But that's not—I mean, if you really didn't want to—"

"I don't think you're allowed to tie me down and rape me, if that's what you're asking. I'm pretty sure I could contest that."

"But then they'd throw you back in the mines."

"I suppose," John says. He lifts his arm away from his eyes, tucks it under his head. "That's not really—I mean, I _wanted_ this, Rodney. I was waiting for it."

That is ... that is kind of incredible, actually, to think that John's been anticipating this as much as Rodney has, and also a little frustrating, because apparently they've been wasting time. "Were you really?"

"Sure. When Raku told me I was being reassigned, he asked me if I cared that you were a man. I don't know why else that would matter, if you weren't going to ask for this."

Rodney feels a little sick, the livian patties suddenly sitting heavily in his stomach, because maybe John's anticipation hadn't been like Rodney's after all. "So you _are_ only doing this because you have to."

"No! Do you ever actually listen to what people tell you, or do you just hear what you want? I said I wanted this. Are you only doing this because you can?"

Rodney is a little offended. "No. Of course not."

John is staring up at him with hot, hazel eyes. "You're Class Five, so you get a lot of privileges, but free socialization isn't one of them. You're not allowed to have a sexual relationship with anyone but your servant unless you clear it with the Board." He waits a minute. "You did know that, didn't you? That's why all the Fives want servants, isn't it?"

"I think you inhaled too much silian dust in the mines, is what I think. Who told you that Fives are restricted from having sexual relationships?"

Now John looks uncertain. "I don't know. Everybody knows that."

"Define everybody."

John is mulish. "I don't know."

"It wasn't the all-knowing, all-seeing Bolu, was it? He of the mighty, mighty intellect and vast wisdom?"

"Hey," John says hotly, "Bolu's a good guy. And let me tell you, jealous is not a good look for you."

"I'm not jealous. Why should I be jealous? Class Twos can't have sexual relationships. Everybody knows _that_."

"But we all had sex anyway," John fires back. "Which is more than you can say, apparently."

Rodney stares at him, eyes narrowed. "You're lying. You're totally lying. Class Twos don't have sex. In the mines? With the lice? I don't believe it."

"Fine," John says. His mouth is set in a thin, tight line. "Fine. Forget it. This was obviously a terrible idea." He sits up, shoulders locked and tense, apparently oblivious to his nudity. "I'm going to go finish cleaning the kitchen, if that's all right with you, _master_?"

"No, it's not all right!" Rodney reaches out, and touches John's shoulder, which shakes a little under his touch. "I just don't want you to feel coerced, all right? This whole master-servant thing is bad enough without thinking I'm forcing you to sleep with me."

"Stop thinking it," John says simply. "I'd tell you if you were forcing me. When I had to make you those grotesque iza fruit pancakes, I complained about it for two days. And when you made me scrub the shower with silonia cream I called Raku and said you were abusing your position, remember?"

Rodney grins a little. "He wasn't very sympathetic."

"Not even a little bit. Rodney, you have to trust me on this. Just because I have to do what you tell me doesn't mean I have to pretend to like it. And that, before? With all the panting and moaning? That wasn't me pretending. All right?"

"All right," Rodney says. "But I swear, if for one second I think that you are only doing this because you think you have to, I'll-"

"You'll what?" John sounds genuinely amused, and he lies back down, looking up at Rodney through heavy-lidded, flirtatious eyes. "You'll punish me?"

Rodney snorts. "Don't tempt me."

~~

Rodney only punishes John once, and it is entirely by accident and not in any real way Rodney's fault (or so he says, although the fact of the matter is, he blames himself entirely). He stopped carrying around the "behavior modification device" (the polite name for the personal subduer) by the end of John's first week; he likes to think he is a pretty good judge of character, and also, if the authorities' claims are to be believed, violent impulses are almost entirely eliminated by Treatment. Certainly Rodney never feels threatened in any way by John; exactly the opposite, in fact. John makes him feel secure and comfortable in a way he hadn't known was possible. Even in this place, without his memories, he feels he can relax so long as John is around.

So it's only natural that he grows complacent over time as he and John get comfortable around each other. The controller, unnecessary, migrates from Rodney's pocket to a desk drawer, then from a desk drawer to his underwear drawer, then to a shelf in the linen closet where Rodney kind of hopes he will forget about it. Instead, it gets tangled up in some sheets, which is how, John, one day, accidentally stumbles across it.

"Hey," John says, when Rodney comes home from work, distracted and irritated by a project that's not going well, mainly because his boss and all his coworkers are complete and utter imbeciles. John looks a little guilty, and is doing that thing where he looks at Rodney without actually focusing on him. "I, uh, might have broken something today."

Rodney looks around the small apartment. There is very little in it that could conceivably be broken. He has nothing of real value, certainly nothing delicate for art's sake. "What was it? A glass? A plate? We can get more." It's a little bit of a waste spending rations on plates that could be spent on food, but Rodney's enough of a realist to recognize that things get broken sometimes, even by someone as compulsively vigilant as John.

"No," John says. "Not a plate." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small metal cylinder which Rodney doesn't even recognize at first. (This is one part Rodney doesn't forgive himself for later, for not recognizing it right away, for not telling John to put the thing the hell down.) "It was on the top shelf in the closet, behind the sheets. I didn't even see it until it hit the floor. Cracked me in the head on the way down." John turns it around in his hands, still looking guilty. "I don't know what it's supposed to do, but it doesn't seem to do it anymore. I'm sorry."

It's then Rodney recognizes it, and panics, because John's playing with the damn thing, and obviously doesn't know what it is, which means maybe it's not the deterrent Rodney's always assumed it is, but that's not the point at the moment; that is something to take up with Raku later, after Rodney's gotten it far, far away from John's restless, inquisitive hands. Rodney's proud of himself for keeping his voice level when he speaks. "I'm sure it's fine, but why don't you let me take a look at it? I'll check it out."

And then (this is something else Rodney doesn't forgive himself for later, for sounding so damn casual that John thinks nothing of what he does next) John tosses it over, with perfect aim, trusting Rodney to catch it, which he does, because Rodney's not athletic but he's got good reflexes where technology is concerned.

The thing is, the thing that Rodney doesn't know, can't know since no one has ever bothered to tell him, is that the damn thing's keyed to his DNA, that John could turn the power supply on and off all day and the device still wouldn't activate for him, but that Rodney, in catching it, can activate it without even meaning to.

John's scream is terrible, ear-shattering, and there's a heart-stopping moment when Rodney is so startled he does nothing at all except watch John collapse to the floor, convulsing. Then his brain catches up, leaps ahead, and he fumbles at the device, hitting the single button, squeezing it as hard as he can, praying to whatever god will listen that he turns it off instead of accidentally turning it up.

There's a buzzing in the room that Rodney doesn't even notice until it stops. John goes instantly limp on the floor, motionless. For a horrible second, Rodney thinks he's killed him. But he finds a pulse when he places trembling fingers on John's neck, and it only takes a minute before John opens his eyes, which are wide, green and bewildered, and filled with tears.

John stares at him blankly, "What-? Who-?"

"God," Rodney says, panicked. This is so very, very not good. "John, are you okay?"

"I-" John swallows, looks around with nothing but confusion in his eyes. "What's going on? What happened?"

Rodney doesn't have an answer, but stares down at the device in his hand. "I'm sorry, John, I'm so sorry."

"Why- why are you sorry? Why am I on the floor? What happened?" John struggles to his feet, wincing. "Jesus, I have the worst headache."

"Jesus?" Rodney repeats faintly. "Who is—John, it's me. You know me, right?"

John turns around, still bewildered. "Of course I do. What happened, Rodney? Did I faint or something?"

Sometimes, Rodney knows, people who have been through traumatic incidents won't remember what happened. He presumes that's what going on here, and he's kind of relieved about it, because really, what good would it do John to remember screaming his way through some kind of accidental punishment? None at all. "You didn't faint," Rodney says. "There was an accident." That is not exactly inaccurate.

"An accident," John repeats. He still sounds dazed, and he's staring around the room, blinking. "I don't remember ... when did you get home? God," he adds, collapsing on the couch and dropping his head in his hands, "my head is killing me." He swallows once, then again, and when he looks up his face is tinged green. "I think I'm going to be sick."

He makes it to the bathroom before he throws up, but when it happens, it's violent and unrelenting for three long minutes.

"Okay," Rodney says shakily, when the worst seems to have passed and he judges that he's done all the therapeutic back-patting that is necessary at the moment, "all right. Are you all right now?"

John manages a weak nod and lets Rodney clean him up and lead him back to the couch. "I don't-" John closes his eyes, lets his head drop back against the pillows. "I feel awful. What happened, Rodney?"

"I told you," Rodney says helplessly. "There was an accident."

"You did?" John's still confused, still in pain, and Rodney's starting to get seriously frightened, because he doesn't think Raku ever actually told him what the subduer was meant to do, and he has no idea if this is normal or not. "I don't remember. What happened?"

"You, uh, you found this thing in my closet, and—" Rodney stops, and stares at John for a minute, starting to wonder how far the confusion and forgetfulness go. "John," he says, speaking carefully, "do you know what day it is?"

"Second," John says. "Isn't it? I got cheese. I was going to make that cheese bread you liked, with the sauce." He stares back at Rodney, his expression clearing. "Why are you home so early, anyway?"

"It's not early," Rodney says. "I got home late, actually."

"But it's the middle of the afternoon. Isn't it?" At Rodney's shake of the head, John says helplessly, "I don't understand what's going on." But then his gaze, still restless, falls upon the metal controller, lying on the floor where Rodney dropped it. John stares at it for a second and goes still and pale, horrible comprehension flooding his face. "Is that- did you have to punish me?"

"I- no," Rodney says weakly. "Not on purpose."

"Shit," John says. His voice is low and horrified. "What did I do?"

"You didn't. You _didn't_ ," Rodney says.

John doesn't seem to hear him. He jumps to his feet, pacing, and his eyes skitter around the room. He looks trapped, caged. "Why would I—I can't even _remember_."

"You didn't do anything," Rodney insists. He crosses the room and grabs John's arm. "It was an accident, John, I swear."

"An accident," John repeats dully. He laughs a little, but it's choked and muted. "They're going to take me back to the mines. They're going to Treat me again." He laughs again, but now it's verging on hysterical. "I'm going to forget everything. You, all of this ... I'm going to be even more messed up. Probably won't be able to remember my own name. If it's even really John."

"No," Rodney says, "none of that is going to happen. You're not listening to me. You didn't do anything. It was an _accident_. We don't even have to tell them."

John looks utterly defeated, like he's already resigned to losing the tenuous foothold he's managed to gain here. "They already know. They monitor those devices, you know that. Want to make sure you're not torturing the staff. They're probably on their way here already."

This is true. Rodney remembers Raku telling him this, remembers some of his coworkers whispering rumors about other Fives who've been demoted for being unduly harsh to their servants. Some have even been completely declassified and sent to the mines themselves. By the time the chime rings a few minutes later, Rodney's worked himself up into a complete panic. John is sitting on the couch, head in his hands, and doesn't even look up when Rodney opens the door. It is Raku, accompanied by three burly security guards armed with subduers—the big ones that don't pretend to be anything other than what they are.

"It was an accident!" Rodney says, before Raku's even all the way into the apartment. "He didn't do anything. I didn't mean to punish him. This is just a big, unfortunate, painful misunderstanding."

Raku is checking out the apartment with clinical, dispassionate eyes. His gaze, when it comes to rest back on Rodney, is not overtly hostile but it's not friendly, either. This is as opposed to the security guards, who definitely look mean. "An accident." His voice is flat, completely unemotional.

"It would almost be a funny story if it didn't involve me inadvertently torturing John for a few seconds, but yes, really, it was an accident. The controller was on a shelf, John knocked it down, long story, but there was no intent on either of our sides."

Raku draws in a long deep breath through his nose, then shifts his attention to where John is sitting on the couch. "How much time did he lose?"

Rodney has no idea what Raku's asking. "He ... it was only a few seconds before I realized and turned it off."

"Memory," Raku says, mouth tight. "How much memory did he lose? Did he recognize you? Did he know what day it was?"

"Oh. Yes. He knew what day it was. He—he didn't recognize me at first, I think, but that was only briefly, right afterwards. He knew the day. He might have lost a couple of hours."

Raku seems satisfied, if not happy. "Physical symptoms?"

"Well, he has an awful headache, but-"

"Did he lose consciousness?" Raku interrupts impatiently. "Did he have any seizures? Delusions? Nose bleed?"

"He was unconscious, but only for a second. He woke up right away. He ... when the device was on he had convulsions but they stopped as soon as I turned it off. He threw up a few times immediately afterwards. No seizures or nose bleeds."

"Has he spoken? Is he coherent?"

"Yes, yes, perfectly coherent. A little confused, I think, but nothing worse. You can ask him yourself. He's right there."

Raku's mouth twists into a small frown, but he crosses over to the couch and kneels down in front of John. "Can you open your eyes for me?" He's considerate and gentle, which Rodney takes as a good sign.

John raises his head. His eyes are dull and a little glassy, but he follows Raku's finger across his field of vision, and he's able to provide his name, class, and rank.

"Well," Raku says, standing up, "I don't think there's any need to call in the medics. He'll have the headache for a few days. Do you have any analgesics here?"

"Three kinds," Rodney says. "Some are better than others for-"

"Give him any of them so long as it's buffered," Raku says. "Maximum dose, at least for tonight. Tomorrow as well, probably. You'll want to hold off on dinner for at least an hour, John, and don't eat anything that's likely to upset your stomach."

John nods mutely.

"You'll need to come with me," Raku says to Rodney, without the solicitousness he showed to John, but without overt hostility either. "You three," he says to the security guards, "stay here until I get back."

"But I told you," Rodney insists, "it was just an accident." Now that John is apparently okay, and presumably not going to be punished, Rodney lets himself worry for his own safety.

"Surely you realize that we can't take your word for it," Raku answers neutrally. "Rodney, it is not that I doubt you, but we have procedures in place for your protection as well as for John's. He can't be witness to anything today after what happened, obviously, and I can not just accept your story as truth. There's no need to worry," he adds, in what he probably means as reassurance. "The procedure is quite painless."

"Procedure!"

John looks up at this, but he doesn't say anything.

"Come," Raku says. "You'll be back in time for a late dinner."

~~

When Rodney arrives back at his apartment, he can smell the cheese pie cooking. It's a relief to notice something so normal. Raku sniffs and makes a face, eyebrows raised. "Is that your dinner? Occasionally the confusion can last for a few hours, even after so short a punishment. Perhaps John should not have attempted to cook so soon."

"Are you crazy? He's making cheese pie. It's fantastic." After the words are out of his mouth, it occurs to Rodney that accusing Raku of insanity, even in jest, is not the best idea, but Raku doesn't seem to mind.

"If that is what you think," Raku agrees dubiously.

Raku is all brusque business when they enter Rodney's apartment (although he does make a face at the smell of the cheese pies, even stronger inside the apartment than without) and Rodney, who normally likes Raku as much as a prisoner can like a jailor, finds himself wishing Raku would just hurry up and leave. The security guards are looming presences, radiating indifference if not outright hostility, and John is busy in the kitchen, restless and sloppy, clanging plates and dropping utensils, in what is a direct contrast to his usual quiet efficiency.

Raku nods at the guards and says, "You can return to your posts." They leave without acknowledging Rodney at all, which is fine so far as Rodney is concerned.

"John," Raku calls, "come here for a moment, please."

John emerges, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He looks calm, self-assured, but Rodney can see that his hands are shaking. "Sir," John says deferentially.

"I'll keep this brief," Raku says with a polite nod, so unlike the guards' studied indifference. "We've found no evidence of wrong-doing here on either of your parts, so there will be no punishment for either of you: no demerits, no downranking. However, Rodney, as the superior in this arrangement, bears the responsibility for incidents such as this one. If there is another accidental activation of the device, you will be held accountable for both instances."

"There won't be another instance," Rodney says fervently. "If it were up to me, I'd bury the damn thing."

Raku looks amused. "As you please," he says. "Though you are required to return it when John's service with you ends. How are you feeling, John?"

"Okay," John says neutrally. "I took something for the headache."

"Very good." Raku smiles, then, looking them both in the eyes. "Then I don't think there is any reason for me to keep you from your dinner." With that, he leaves. Rodney waits a short, barely suitable interval before locking the door.

"That won't keep him out, you know," John says from behind him. "They've got keys to all the locks."

"It makes me feel better," Rodney says, following John back into the kitchen. "Okay, so this was officially the worst day I can remember."

John snorts. "Out of all the 200 or so days you can remember, you mean."

"That doesn't make it any less horrendous," Rodney says. He comes up behind John and wraps his arms around him, feels the tremors still running through John's frame. "Are you really okay?"

John shrugs, tense in Rodney's arms. "My head hurts, and I nearly took off my fingers slicing the keeza fruit for sauce, but other than that, I'm all right." He sighs, and relaxes back into Rodney's arms. "What I'd really like is to go to bed and forget this day ever happened. I don't even remember it and I still want to forget it."

"You're better off not remembering. You were screaming, and then you collapsed and I thought you died. It was awful."

John turns around, searches Rodney's face. "Are you _sure_ I didn't do anything wrong? I know you told Raku it was an accident, but-"

"After we left here, Raku took me to a little room in the security office," Rodney interrupts. "And a medic came in and gave me a shot of something and then they hooked me up to a machine and asked me questions and I couldn't stop myself from answering. I would have told them anything they wanted to know. And what I told them was that when you threw me the controller, it turned on, and it was an accident. All right? If it had been anything else, one of us wouldn't be here right now. Stop looking for ways to take the blame for this."

"Okay," John says, nodding slowly, although he still doesn't look convinced. "Okay." 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Rodney hates that John still goes to the mines sometimes. John doesn't tell him when he goes, mostly; he'll admit it if asked outright, but he never volunteers, and Rodney has stopped asking because he doesn't like to see that closed-off expression cross John's face, the way his eyes go cold and distant. Anyway, Rodney knows when John goes to the mine because he can taste it in the silian-tinged sweat on the back of John's neck, can feel the silian ash that's ground into John's skin.

Rodney could keep John from going to the mines just by asking, by inventing some useless, time-consuming chore for John to do around the house, but he's tried that and it never works out, is counter-productive, ultimately. John doesn't like going to the mines, per se, but he hates being bored, and going to the mines keeps him occupied, keeps him productive.

Rodney can relate to this; the need to be busy and useful is equally as important to him, and he doesn't think he'd do as well in John's place, trapped in a tiny apartment all day without anyone to talk to except the few servants he's met at the commissary, forced to spend his time cooking and cleaning and _puttering_. John is smart—very smart, much smarter than he lets on, but Rodney's very good at ferreting out the signs of true intelligence, and John reeks of it—but he is also a Class Two and that means he's restricted from doing anything except manual labor.

Sometimes Rodney wonders what John did, who he was, before he ended up here. It's not a mystery he thinks about in relation to himself; he has a feeling his life before was not all that dissimilar to his life now, but it's clear that John's better suited for a life very different than the one he's leading now. Rodney imagines John out of prison, which is hard to do because everything Rodney knows is inside the compound, but when he does, he sees John doing something exciting or dangerous. Something more challenging than doing Rodney's laundry.

Mostly this all means that Rodney spends far too much of his time thinking of things for John to do that will keep him busy at home, because every afternoon spent in Rodney's apartment is an afternoon not spent in the mines, breathing in toxic ash and coming home with bruises he never talks about.

"I have an idea," Rodney announces when he comes home one Fifth Day. "You could make a bigger bed frame; it's ridiculous that we're still squeezing onto that single mattress, especially considering what it does to my back, and we'd save a lot of rations if we requisitioned the raw materials instead of the bed itself, so—John? Are you here?"

The apartment smells of fresh bread and cream soup, so John has obviously been home, but the table isn't set and John's not in the kitchen or the bedroom.

"John?" It's disconcerting to come home to an empty apartment. It's been less than one full season and yet Rodney's already become used to John's presence.

Before Rodney has time to work himself up into a full-blown panic (which he can do in a remarkably short amount of time. "It's a talent," he has told John, who just laughs in his face), the door opens and John comes rushing in, carrying a couple of bags and looking harried. "Rodney," he says with a grimace. "I'm sorry; we ran out of hegel spice and the soup won't taste right without it. The line at the quartermaster's was unbelievable. There must have been a hundred people. It took two hours."

He brushes past Rodney and thrusts a bag at him. "Here. I got some extra soap and shampoo while I was there. Quartermaster was overstocked so they were cheap." Then he disappears into the kitchen, cursing under his breath about the soup overcooking.

Rodney blinks down at the bag in his hand, then turns and goes into the bathroom and deposits the supplies there. "You want me to set the table?" he offers when he comes out, knowing full well John will say 'no' because that is one of the things John has not eased up on, even a little.

"I-", John says from the kitchen, then pauses. Breathes once, slowly. "No," he says, and it is not Rodney's imagination that there is reluctance in his voice. "I'll do it."

This is a rare opportunity, and Rodney pounces on it. "John, it is not going to violate any unwritten servant code if I set the table once, is it? Just once? So we can eat a little sooner? I'm very hungry."

John looks torn, glancing from the table to the soup tureen and back to the table again. "I'm supposed-"

"Yes, I know it's your job, but seriously, I am _very_ hungry, and honestly, I would prefer to save the extra five minutes if it gets the food on the table faster."

John narrows his eyes at him, like he knows Rodney's lying—which he probably does, because Rodney _is_ lying and he can never fool John—but then he grinds his teeth together like he is conceding some long and painful war, forced to his knees with both hands bound behind his back and prevented from throwing himself on a grenade so he can die rather than give in (Rodney has a very vivid imagination). "Fine," John says. He is going to be irritable for the rest of the night. "Do you know where everything is?"

"It's my apartment," Rodney says, offended, but it turns out he does not know where everything is, not anymore; John has reorganized the plates and utensils and just about everything else. Since John never lets him do anything at all, Rodney has never even noticed.

"Hey," Rodney says, carefully placing the spoons next to the bowls, "what's this paper? Can I throw it out?"

"No!" John says, emerging from the kitchen, looking spooked. "No you can't. It's important."

"Important? Why? What-" Rodney is already unfolding it and reading it, never mind that it is John's and possibly private. Rodney has a very poor sense of personal boundaries. He goes silent as he scans the writing, recognizing Raku's small, immaculate printing. "You were reclassed?"

"Upranked," John says. He sounds happy, and comes out of the kitchen with a big serving bowl and a ladle. "I'm not eligible for reclass until at least the end of the season, probably longer."

"Upranked," Rodney says. "That's good, though. What does it mean?"

"Not very much, really," John says with a shrug that is very affected and does nothing to hide the fact that he is seriously cheerful. He disappears into the kitchen and reappears with the loaf of bread, which has a strong yeasty smell that makes Rodney's mouth water. "But you'll like this part: I'm out of the mines."

"You're out of the mines anyway," Rodney says. He breaks off a piece of bread and dips it into the soup, biting back the small involuntary moan that wants to escape. John's cooking is so good, plain and simple but satisfying in a way the commissary food just isn't. "Mostly."

"I'm out of the mines entirely now," John says. "Apparently, at my new rank I qualify for pulling hours with the sanitation department. It's not great, really, but hey, no more silian dust in the house."

Personally, Rodney doesn't think sanitation is such a step up, except that so far as he's heard, no one's died while cleaning out the public toilets, and John seems to be genuinely pleased. "So how does that work? I thought sanitation was strictly scheduled."

"Oh, it is. The staff are all new Class Threes, and they're psychotic about sticking to schedules because they're afraid they'll get demoted if they're late. I'm just assigned as a backup for emergencies. Clogged toilets, broken showers, trash overflows, that kind of stuff."

"The disgusting stuff," Rodney says dryly.

"Yeah, but if I do well there, it'll increase my chances of getting reclassed."

John, like all the other Class Twos Rodney has ever met (or heard other people talking about), wants to be promoted with an intensity that far outstrips rationality. Rodney understands that it's a big deal, especially for the Twos stuck in the mine; he even understands that John, who's more or less leading the relatively privileged life of a Class Five, still wants the security of being Class Three, where his freedom from oola stew and his ability to shower in private is not dependent on remaining in Rodney's good graces. But Rodney also knows that once John is promoted, he'll go live in the dormitory with the other Threes, that he'll eat all his meals in the Class Three commissary, that there will be no more late nights sitting up reading literature out loud or early mornings spent in bed together. Rodney doesn't think it's asking too much for John to be a _little_ put out by the possibility of losing those things.

But he can't say this to John, because John's sitting across from him, dipping his bread in his soup and smiling in the rare way that means he's truly, genuinely happy. And Rodney, who is stupid and hopeless because John is his _servant_ and they are not now nor have ever been on equal footing, doesn't want to dim that smile, even a little bit.

~~

It's a strange, strange prison, Rodney thinks. He's got nothing in memory to compare it to, obviously, but there's a part of him that feels very strongly that prison isn't _this_. Prison, he thinks, is a cell, or a cage, maybe damp and dank, or cold and sterile, barely lit or else illuminated so brightly it's impossible to sleep, with vermin, inedible food, and hard labor.

Prison isn't warm, sunny days, strolling leisurely back from a late, long lunch, his servant/lover/best friend at his side. To be sure, he only gets one afternoon off in eight, and the food in the commissary is only barely tolerable, especially now that he's used to John's cooking, but ... he's gotten the chance to get used to John's cooking, and there's nothing about that that feels like prison, or any kind of punishment.

"I'll tell you one thing," John says, "I am never complaining about the state of your bathroom again."

"That bad?"

John spent the morning on latrine duty, cleaning out the public restrooms that are scattered throughout the complex. To Rodney, it sounds absolutely disgusting, but John's in a pretty good mood despite the hours spent up to his knees in filth and stench. John, Rodney thinks, likes tasks that are concrete, where he can see the difference he's made, even in a short amount of time. He wouldn't be well-suited for Rodney's job, to sit and toil in a lab day after day, making dubious progress in infinitesimal increments. Not that Rodney's all that crazy about the slow progress, either; it's the one part of his life that doesn't feel like it fits. Rodney still doesn't have any idea what his life was like before, but he guesses the accomplishments ran closer together.

"You can't even imagine. Kilef—I mentioned him, right?—he says that the team that was assigned to the latrines on the outer loops got reassigned to mess clean-up last week because Etrus slipped and broke her leg and Jenul got some kind of stomach virus and has been throwing up all week."

"They didn't assign anyone else to cover the latrines?"

John gives him a look. "Obviously not, or they wouldn't have needed me on clean-up duty."

"Well, yes, obviously they _didn't_ do it, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it."

"Should've, could've," John says, and shrugs. "It wasn't so bad, once I got used to the smell. May have to burn the clothes, though. I've already run them through the wash, and they still stink."

Someone steps into their path, large and bulky and ominous. "Hey, John. Let's talk."

They both stop and take a step back from the security officer who's blocking their way, inexplicably paying attention to them in the exact way security officers don't. Looking directly at them, even, with eye contract and everything.

John eyes the man dubiously. "Sir?"

The man nods slowly. "Of course," he says, "you don't remember me. You've been Treated since then."

John glances over at Rodney, who feels threatened and helpless in equal measure, his good mood evaporating rapidly. John's attention is already back on the security officer, and he looks, for once, completely and utterly focused and intent, assessing. Rodney is not sure why John glanced at him; there was a message in John's eyes, but Rodney has no idea what it meant.

No one around them is paying any attention, on purpose, probably. Nothing good ever comes of talking to security, and no one here ever wants to get involved in someone else's problem.

"I'm sorry, sir," John says. He's deferential, but not submissive, and in truth he doesn't sound particularly sorry, which isn't a surprise as he doesn't know what he's supposed to be apologizing for, but also isn't very smart, since the security officer obviously has some kind of grievance, and there is clearly nothing to be gained by pissing him off further. John probably realizes this, but he's also obviously made the assessment that nothing he can say or do is going to be sufficient appeasement. As Rodney watches, John's back straightens and his shoulders tense, readying for a fight. Rodney recognizes the signs, even though he doesn't ever remember seeing them before. "If I did something to offend you."

The man laughs. It's anything but pleasant. "You didn't offend me," he says. "And I shouldn't even be talking to you. A Class Two." He spits it out like it's a filthy insult. "But it's not right, you not remembering. It's not fair, that you get to just forget it, forget everything, like it never happened."

"Believe me," John says, and wow, Rodney thinks, it's like John's becoming someone else entirely, right before his eyes: growing taller, leaner, more intent, "I wish I could remember it too. Along with lots of other things. Like, say, my _life_."

The guard's studying John, eyes glinting meanly. "I can see it in you, still. Doesn't matter how many times they Treat you. Some people can't be fixed."

"See what in me?" John's voice is low and kind of scary. He's got his fists clenched at his side, and Rodney's never seen him less relaxed. He looks like he's holding himself in check, like he could go off at any minute.

"Violence," the man says. "Aggression. It's in your blood. They can Treat you until the end of time and they won't be able to erase it." He leans in close. "You _want_ it."

"No," John says. "You're wrong."

But he's not wrong, Rodney thinks. He's not wrong, and this must be why John's been Treated over and over; maybe he tried to escape and maybe he didn't, but if he did he didn't do it the way Rodney would, with subterfuge and deception. John would do it honestly, openly, but it would be loud and fast and violent, and people would get hurt and John, maybe, wouldn't really care if it got him what he wanted. Or maybe he would care a little, maybe Rodney's reading too much into the way John's standing there looking alive and expectant and _eager_.

The officer laughs. "It's driving you crazy," he says. "Knowing I'm right about you, not knowing what you did."

"It's not going to keep me up at night," John says, slow and careless, "but you obviously want to tell me."

The officer's laughter abruptly dies away, and he leans in close, feigning intimacy, his eyes glinting. Rodney's starting to wonder if he's entirely sane, and that is just wonderful, that is all they need, to be accosted by a security officer with some kind of problem with John and an undiagnosed psychological instability. There is just no way that can end well. "They tell me I should just forget it. Like you did. That it's not important, that no one actually died, so it doesn't matter."

"I can't defend something I can't remember," John says levelly. "If you're trying to get me to swing first, it's not going to happen."

"No, I can see that," the guard says. He sounds disappointed, maybe a little resigned, but then, without warning, he throws a punch directly at John's face.

To Rodney, it's a complete surprise, even though he's been standing there watching the conversation go downhill, knowing it would come to this, that there's no way it could have come to anything else. But to John it must have been no surprise at all, because he ducks out of the way long before the punch comes anywhere near his face, and comes up with a punch of his own to the guard's midsection that leaves the man gasping. Then, carefully, John takes a step back and away, out of range.

"We don't have to do this," he says evenly, except, god, he wants to. Rodney can see it in his eyes, alive with unholy anticipation. It's a little bit terrifying, because Rodney has never seen John want anything quite this much.

"I think we do," the guy says, and just like that, they're fighting, over what? The guard has never actually said, and John doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know.

Rodney has never seen anybody actually punch anybody else—or if he has, he doesn't remember it—but it's a lot worse than he'd imagined. Flesh hitting flesh makes a sickening kind of thud, and skin splits far too easily, spilling blood everywhere.

"Stop," Rodney says, as if anyone's listening to him. "Stop! Someone's going to see you."

But neither of the two men pays any attention, or else he's right, and neither of them cares, are either oblivious to the consequences or are not scared by them. Rodney thinks in a sort of nauseated horror: John _did_ want this, he's enjoying it; in some sick, twisted sort of way, he likes it. John's face is bloodied and his mouth's set in a hard, grim line, but Rodney can still tell that John's not fighting his hardest, that if he wanted to, he could end this right now, but he's dragging it out because he likes it. In some way that Rodney hopes he'll never understand, this is fun for John.

It's not fun for Rodney, and it's especially not fun when the guy pulls out a subduer and points it at John's head. "Now," he snarls, "you'll finally get what you deserve," and good god, it's so _cliché_ Rodney wants to laugh, except that the guy is pointing a weapon right at John's head, and there is no way out of this, but in a blur of movement John twists out and under and he knocks the guy's legs right out from under him, kicks the subduer away.

He's good at this, Rodney thinks, torn between admiration and horror. Somehow, despite all the Treatments, John's retained memories that he shouldn't, and he knows just how to twist and bend and brace himself, to take a fight and make it his own.

When the guard rises to his feet, John is right there, attacking now instead of defending, dodging and weaving and twisting in a pattern that's familiar, even though Rodney can't remember from where. Rodney racks his brain and racks it some more trying to remember before he gets it; when he does, he laughs, even though it's not funny, but still, it's the damn exercises, the one John does all the time with the sticks, the ones he can't remember learning but does religiously nonetheless.

John with the sticks is all fluid grace, liquid motion, and Rodney's always liked watching him twist his body around, hard muscles rippling under golden skin, but it's different when it's fast like this. In slow motion, as exercise, it looks like some kind of exotic dance, but at speed it's easy to see the moves for what they are, violence doled out with deadly precision. Even without the sticks, John looks lethal. Rodney thinks that if he had his memory, if he was reacting on more than instinct, the security officer would already be dead on the ground.

As it is, the officer is running out of energy. He didn't expect this, Rodney thinks; how could he have? He's obviously seen John fight before, maybe fought with him himself, but that was at least one Treatment ago, and he'd been expecting less skill, less vigor. "John," Rodney says urgently, "John, we have to go," even though there is nowhere to go, no place to run. But it's too late anyway, because someone obviously overcame their fear of getting involved and has called in a security detail. There are four hulking officers running towards them with their weapons drawn, and the officer John's fighting looks up from where he's lying on the ground, blood streaming from a cut over his eye, and grins. "You lose," he says, and that's when the world goes to hell.

~~

"I don't think you understand," Rodney says, with false and highly exaggerated patience. He is tired and worried and hungry and stressed to a degree he has not previously experienced. "I'm not asking you to see him. I'm telling you that I'm _going_ to see him."

The woman behind the desk squares her jaw. "You are the one who doesn't understand. No prisoners are admitted to the ward unless they're patients. I don't care who you are. You're not going to see him."

But of course, Rodney does see him, is seeing him even now, in his head. John is screaming, collapsed on the ground, writhing in what must be agony. He's screaming over and over again, just won't stop screaming. Rodney can't recall now how long it lasted, only that it seemed to go on forever, and that there was nothing he could do to stop any of it.

Rodney closes his eyes against the vision, but of course that just makes it worse, makes more vivid the convulsions wracking John's body, the pink-tinged foam on John's lips. He shudders once and shakes himself out of it, already practiced at it after only a few hours. "Look," he says carefully, "I understand that you have rules, and that you probably have no personal discretion to bend them, being, what, a Class Three?"

"Four," the woman says tightly. Her name, Rodney notes, is Tilja. Her name tag is old and scratched. He wonders how long she's been here.

"Four," Rodney says. "Good for you. But surely there's somebody here who _does_ have the authority to make an exception? I am not asking for fun, you realize. I have legitimate reasons for needing to see John." Needing to see John alive, not screaming, not writhing. Needing to see him breathing on his own, not gasping for breath, lips turning blue. The fact that he can't close his eyes without seeing John doing all those things is, in Rodney's mind, the most legitimate reason of all.

"Legitimate reasons," Tilja says skeptically. She takes out a stylus, taps it slowly against a tablet. "Then why don't you give me some of those reasons, and I'll take the list to my supervisor, and _he_ can tell you that you're not going to see your friend."

Rodney huffs. (John is screaming in his head, and Rodney can't stop it, can't do anything, and the security officer is standing off to the side wiping the blood off his nose, grinning). "He's my servant. My reasons for wanting to see him are _personal_ , and if you think that I'm going to recount them for you so you can put them up on the bulletin board, you are sadly mistaken."

"And you," Tilja says distinctly, "are not getting onto the ward."

"Listen to me," Rodney says desperately, "I have to see him. Couldn't you just see your way around your precious, inflexible rules for just long enough to let me in there?"

"No." She sounds bored.

"Rodney."

Rodney spins around. Raku is standing there, looking slightly irritated and tremendously harried. His usually immaculate hair is skewed at funny angles, and his Administrator's robe is crooked. "I understand that you find it effective in the lab to bludgeon your coworkers with the force of your intractability, but I suggest that it would be in your best interests not to antagonize the Facility staff."

"I wouldn't need to antagonize her if she would just let me in to see John."

Raku looks away for a minute, his eyes and expression grave. "Rodney," he says, with unexpected compassion, "he's not going to remember you."

Rodney stares at Raku for a minute, then shakes his head, dismissing his utterly ridiculous, implausible words. "No," he says firmly. "No, no, no. You can't have had him Treated already. It's only been a few hours. It was just ... we were just walking back from lunch."

"We didn't Treat him," Raku says carefully. "But, Rodney-"

"No," Rodney says. "No, see, that's good. Especially because it wasn't his fault. I mean, that officer, he just attacked John for no reason. Well," he says, "for no reason that he was willing to share. I'm sure he had some reason."

"He had a good reason, in his mind," Raku says. "Though that was no excuse for accosting John like that, and he will be disciplined appropriately. Still, Rodney, you must remember, John has no legal standing, and he _did_ swing first."

Rodney gapes at him. "What? Who- what? Who told you that?"

"Elsha," Raku says curiously. "The officer himself."

"But-" Rodney gapes some more, because the one thing he hasn't considered is that the officer will simply _lie_ , as if he can't be called on it, as if nobody had been there to see. "But he's lying. _He_ threw the first punch, not John. John wouldn't do that." Although John had wanted to; Rodney remembers the eagerness John has been unable to hide, the way he was holding himself in check. But he _had_ held himself in check. He'd had that much self-control, at least.

Raku's voice is gentle. "You have no way of knowing this, but believe me when I tell you John would throw the first punch. He has before."

"Fine," Rodney says peevishly. "Maybe he would. Maybe he has, in some past life he can't remember. Elsie knew about it though, right? That's probably what gave him confidence that his bald-faced lie would be credible. The only problem, a rather big problem, if you ask me, is, hello, an eye-witness? Namely me? I was standing right there. I know he's lying."

Raku sighs. "Rodney. Understand, even as a Class Five, you are a prisoner as much as John. You have no more legal standing than he does."

Rodney snaps his fingers, a lot. "Right, right. I'm sure whatshisname knew that, too. If he even noticed me. It's not like the officers ever acknowledge us, anyway. We're not even people to them, more like scenery. But surely my testimony counts for _something_. You people aren't completely irrational. I mean, we're talking about John's life, here. If you Treat him again, he'll lose everything." He focuses on Raku again, who's looking a little assaulted himself, and very conflicted. "Can't you shoot me up with more of those happy drugs that made me tell you everything? Truth serum, or whatever it was? I can't lie to you then, right? I can understand that you don't want to use them on your precious, sterling Eslu, because he's a security officer and therefore his word is beyond reproach, but I'm just another prisoner. What's to stop you from using them on me? I'm even _volunteering_."

"I'm not certain any evidence you give would be admissible," Raku says with a frown, but he's considering it, Rodney can tell.

"But what's the harm? Even if it gives you evidence you can't use, you'll know the truth, at least. Don't you want to know if you've got some psychotic, vindictive officer roaming around beating up prisoners on a whim?"

"Hardly a whim," Raku murmurs. "It was hardly a whim, Rodney. But very well. Come with me."

~~

It is a short walk from the Facility ward to an examination room suitable for an interrogation. The walk back, an hour later, seems much longer. That is mostly because the room is spinning, and Rodney is feeling vaguely nauseous, the memories of John on the ground ( _screaming, screaming, screaming_ ) that much more vivid after intense grilling about them. He'd gone through it over and over, answered question after question, and though he'd had to tell them how John had looked, how he'd wanted it, no matter how Raku phrased his questions, the answer was always the same. Elsha, the guard, had provoked the assault. Elsha had tried to get John to swing first, and when that failed, he'd thrown the first punch himself.

Raku leads Rodney back to the waiting room outside John's ward, and then leads him to a chair and sits him down. "Rest now, Rodney. That was quite a long session. I'll be back in a few minutes."

It's longer than that before Raku returns, but Rodney's not quite sure how long because the drugs are making him feel sick. Also, he hasn't eaten in hours, which is making him sicker still, so he just sits there with his head down, trusting that Raku will come get him when it's necessary, and leave him alone before that. His stupid, drugged brain is being particularly recalcitrant. Rodney has had enough of seeing John screaming on the ground, and he would like very much for his brain to just _quit it_ , instead of proving, again, how close to perfect his visual memory is. Rodney considers that falling into a hypoglycemic coma would likely solve his immediate problem, though he is none too sure that he won't, upon waking, be forced to deal with it all over again.

This is why, he thinks, he needs to see John. Even if John is unconscious in a bed, connected to tubes and monitors and things, he won't be screaming. Rodney desperately needs a new image of John to lay over the old.

There is a tap on his shoulder. "Yes?" Rodney says blearily. His eyes are not focusing all that well. "Yes, what is it?"

"Rodney." It is Raku, sitting in the chair next to him. "I wanted to tell you, in person. We ... I've forwarded your testimony to the council. They'll have to decide what to do with it, but I think ... your testimony was quite compelling. I believe Elsha will be held accountable for assault. He will no doubt object to you as a witness but ... it is uncommon, but there is legal precedent for interrogating him with the serum, if necessary."

Rodney takes a deep breath. "Good," he says. "That's good. That's excellent. Can I ... can I tell John?"

Raku's face goes blank. "Rodney. As I told you, he will not remember you."

"Maybe not now," Rodney says. "I understand that he'll be a little out of it for a while, but it's been hours, already. I mean, you can't have Treated him already; I did research. It takes days to do it properly. You can't just zap somebody and boom, he loses his memories ..." But then Rodney remembers the day he accidentally punished John, just a few seconds with a small subduer, how John had gone into convulsions then, too, how'd he lost consciousness, how confused he'd been, how he'd lost _hours_.

"That- that-" Rodney stammers, horrified. "That's the Treatment? You've done that to me? To all of us here?"

"No," Raku says. But he's not meeting Rodney's eyes. "Subduers are designed to punish." He is silent for a minute. "Treatment is drawn out over a number of days. It's far less traumatic. But the underlying technology is the same, and John is ... not an optimal subject."

"Not optimal," Rodney repeats hollowly. "I want to see him."

Raku draws in breath slowly. "There is no point."

"I don't care if he doesn't remember me," Rodney says. He stares at his knuckles, and the visions overlaying them are all John: John screaming, but also John cooking, John laughing, John grinning at him before pulling him down to bed. "I remember him."

~~

John's asleep when Rodney's finally given permission to enter his room. He's woken once, according to the attendant, who's disinterested and matter-of-fact, "but he won't remember it."

"Why are his hands restrained?" Rodney asks angrily, as soon as he steps through the door.

"It's a necessary precaution," Raku says from the doorway. He seems reluctant to enter the room itself, and he's more reluctant still to look at John's still form in the bed. "He's usually violent when he wakes. Understand that it's for his own protection as well as our own."

"Credit me with some intelligence," Rodney says. "I doubt very much he needs protection from himself." His back is to the door, rigid with anger, because it's 'John's usually violent when he wakes', not 'John's woken up violent in the past', and how many times does it take to form a pattern, for something to be habit?

"Think what you will," Raku says quietly. "But I believe you would agree it would not do John any good to be subdued again so soon."

"Go away," Rodney says. And then, because Raku is his superior and is doing him a big favor, even if it's out of guilt, Rodney adds, "please. I'd like to be alone with him."

"Very well." There is silence for a minute. "But Rodney, remember that you are required to report to your lab tomorrow morning. There is no dispensation for injuries to a servant, no matter the circumstances." Then he leaves, which is good, because Rodney has suddenly begun to understand how John could have been so eager to punch someone that he would disregard the severity of the consequences.

Raku closes the door behind him, and Rodney collapses into the chair near the bed with a sigh. There are, at least, no beeping machines, no tubes or monitors, and while that's a relief, it's also disconcerting, because without having any reason to expect anything at all, Rodney had expected something very different than this. As clearly as if he'd actually seen it, he'd imagined John lying there, clipped to more monitors than can be counted, white-coated attendants bustling around, doctors with clipboards taking notes. This is strangely silent, sterile, and unfamiliar, which is odd because his whole life is unfamiliar, every new experience something very literally without precedent.

Lying there, asleep, John looks relaxed, placid, but the bruising around his mouth and eyes belies the sense of calm, making it impossible to pretend that John's just lying down for a nap. This is all like some terrible bad dream, preferably someone else's bad dream—John's, maybe, so that when he wakes up, this will all just fade away into misty water-colored memories—which is just the sort of insipid, sappy metaphor that John comes out with _all the time_ , from some hidden wellspring of trite.

Rodney wants this all to fade away into insubstantial mist, wants it badly enough to let himself believe, just a little, that it will actually happen if he wishes for it hard enough. John will wake up, and he will look at Rodney, and the white walls around them will fade away and they will wake up somewhere else, still themselves, but better, with their memories and their freedom. Rodney's even, what—Stupid? Naïve? Blindly optimistic?—enough to squeeze his eyes tight shut and _wish_ , like there's actually a chance that will work, but when he opens his eyes, nothing's changed.

"Come on, John," he sighs. "Time to wake up."

The fact that John _does_ , at that moment, is so laughable, so absurd, that Rodney wouldn't believe it except for the fact that it actually happens.

John wakes with a gasp, draws a choked, strangled breath, and is all at once wide awake, no graceful, dreamy transition easing the way from sleep to consciousness. "What-" He looks around with wide, panicked eyes, and what small hope Rodney has been nursing that John would remember him, flees. "Where-"

Rodney begins to understand what Raku meant, that 'John is usually violent when he wakes,' because John can't be aware of where he is, can't really be comprehending what's happened, but he is already pulling against the bindings on his wrists, testing their strength, struggling against them. He's sitting up, wild-eyed, looking around the room, assessing it; Rodney thinks that in the first few seconds John's already pegged anything that could possibly be used as a weapon, every place that could possibly be an exit.

_Who are you_? Rodney thinks, taken aback. This is a side of John he's never seen, never suspected existed, deeply buried instinct coming to the fore without anything to impede it, patterns of behavior so profoundly entrenched that even Treatment can't erase them. Rodney's more intrigued than afraid. _Who were you?_

"Who are you?" John asks, done with the room and now assessing Rodney with just as much calculation. "What is this place?"

"I'm Rodney. This is a ... a sort of hospital. You're safe."

John regards him silently for a minute, still pulling restlessly at the straps on his wrists. "I don't know you," he says finally, with reluctance, as if he's not sure he should be admitting it, as if he's giving something away.

"No," Rodney says. "No, you wouldn't. Although you did know me, before. You just don't remember it."

"Why not?" John, Rodney thinks, has already realized that it's not just Rodney he doesn't remember. He is far calmer about it than Rodney suspects he was in the same circumstances. "Was there an accident? How long have I been here? Why am I tied down?"

"You-" Rodney sighs. "It's complicated. There are people here whose job it is to explain all of this to you. I wouldn't know where to start."

John's brow crinkles, and that expression, at least, is familiar. "How about you start by telling me who you are? Telling me your name doesn't give me a whole lot to work with."

"Wouldn't you rather know who you are?"

"I'm John," John says simply. "And if there are people here whose job it is to explain this to me, I guess I should let them do it. But I assume you can tell me about yourself, even if it's not your job."

"Funny thing about that," Rodney says. "I can't tell you as much about me as you'd expect."

~~

It's actually a little disconcerting talking to John, who never stops pulling against the restraints on his wrists the entire time, even when he doesn't appear to be consciously doing it. John listens carefully to everything Rodney says, interrupting infrequently, asking questions that seem focused on identifying their, well, captors, which is a term Rodney has never, ever even considered applying to Raku and the other Administrators, trying to assess their tactical position—"we're in prison", Rodney says blankly, "I don't think we have a tactical position,"—trying already to figure out a way to escape.

"Shh!" Rodney says, dropping his voice and looking frantically at the door, which remains quite firmly closed. "Stop thinking about escape. That's what got you into trouble before."

"I thought you said I was fighting." John's eyes are cool, and constantly assessing, always calculating. He is so very little like he was. Rodney can't decide if this persona fits him better than the old. It is quite possibly too soon to tell.

"You were fighting this time. But you've been Treated before. I don't know how many times. And look, it's really not so bad here, for a prison."

"Have a lot of experience with other prisons?" John asks skeptically. "What did you do to wind up here, anyway?"

"Ecological terrorism, apparently. And before you ask, no, I don't know what your crime was. They don't release that information to the other prisoners and you never volunteered it." It's the one question Rodney was never bold enough to ask, and the one question that all his hacking of the compound mainframe proved unequal to answer.

"If I even knew," John says, sighing. He leans back against the pillows, still tugging listlessly against the bonds on his wrists. "They might have only told me the first time. Maybe I never asked."

"It strikes me as extremely probable that you would have asked."

The door opens, and both John and Rodney flinch, although Rodney sees John's eyes flick automatically to the hallway outside, still, _always_ , assessing. It is just the bored attendant, who ignores John completely and speaks to Rodney in a flat, disinterested tone. "You need to leave now," he says to Rodney. "It's time for his exam."

Rodney looks at John, who looks impressively unconcerned, even bored himself. "Are you going to be all right?"

John now looks amused, wearing a quirky little smile. "What will you do if I say no?"

"Right." Rodney looks at the attendant, who now appears both bored and hostile, which is not a very good combination for a caregiver. "I'll come back tomorrow after the end of my shift. Maybe I'll bring dinner. If that's allowed?" He looks at the attendant, who shrugs.

"Your rations," he says. "Do what you want with them."

"I'll bring dinner," Rodney says to John. "I have leftover pizza."

Both John and the attendant look at him, confused. "What's pizza?"

~~

The pizza, which is what John started calling the cheese bread one night, although he never said why and only looked confused when Rodney pressed him on it, reheats well enough, and is still warm when Rodney enters the ward the next evening. John eats it cold for breakfast sometimes, but Rodney doesn't see the appeal of congealed cheese on soggy, saucy bread.

"I brought dinner," he says, unnecessarily he thinks, to the attendant at the desk in the hall. It is a different person, a woman now, with short dark hair, an illegible nametag that marks her as a Class Three of high rank, and the same bored expression as yesterday's attendant, as if she has seen it all and none of it has been that interesting.

She has obviously been briefed about Rodney, because she doesn't give Rodney a hard time at all when he says he is there to see John. "I think he's already eaten," is what she says instead, scratching mechanically with her stylus. It makes sense that John has eaten, because it is long past dinnertime, and it's only Rodney's need to do something constructive that had made bringing food at this hour seem like a good idea.

It was a bit of a waste of time, perhaps, but stopping home and reheating the meal took hardly longer than stopping off at the commissary, which is always crowded in the evening. Plus it gave Rodney a chance to regroup after a day spent with a lab full of people who knew exactly what had happened and were fully determined not to mention it at all, even by oblique reference, which meant that Rodney couldn't talk about it either, which was torture.

That's why entering the clinic is kind of a relief, because at least here no one is pretending that nothing has happened. Here, everyone knows what's happened. If they don't talk about it, it's because they don't care. John's just another blank face to them, and Rodney of less interest than that.

With an awkward nod of thanks—awkward because Rodney is not used to thanking people of lower class and rank, and also because the woman can not be more bored or disinterested in him and his meager gratitude—Rodney slips into John's room, foil-wrapped pizza in hand.

"Hey," he says, "I brought that pizza I promised."

But here is where things do not go according to plan, because according to plan, John is supposed to look up and give him a tentative, weary smile and say something like, "I thought you weren't going to come," and Rodney will say, "I told you I had to work, but look, here's the pizza. You'll love it."

Except instead what happens is that John looks up from where he is tugging on the restraints that still tie him to the bed, and his face sets into a hard, unforgiving scowl. He shows no sign at all that he recognizes Rodney. "You don't need to keep throwing doctors at me," he says, his voice cold. "I'd be a lot more inclined to listen to you if you'd just untie me."

Rodney stands very still for a minute, then edges into the room, shutting the door behind him with his foot. It is impossible to miss the way John tracks the shutting door with his eyes, and the wary attention with which he watches Rodney sit down. There are red marks all around his wrists, and small drops of blood on the sheets.

"Um," Rodney says, with undeniable brilliance. "Not having a good day?"

"Well," John says sarcastically, "I woke up in a hospital somewhere and they won't tell me who I am or what I'm doing here. So no, not having so much of a good day. Which doctor are you? The one who won't tell me what's wrong with me, or the one who won't tell me anything else?"

"I'm-" Rodney stops, and very carefully places the pizza on the table next to John's bed, where John glares at it suspiciously. "Excuse me for a minute."

"Sure," John drawls, and drops his head back on the pillow. He does not watch Rodney leave.

"Hey," Rodney says, snapping his fingers at the attendant at the desk. "You. There's something wrong with him. He doesn't remember who I am."

"He was Treated yesterday," she says, without even looking up. "Of course he doesn't remember you."

Rodney takes a very long, very deep breath. "I came to see him yesterday," he says. "Hours afterward. He was awake. We had a long conversation. He doesn't remember any of it."

"He was Treated yesterday," the attendant repeats. She is still not looking up. "What did you expect?"

Furious, Rodney stalks back into John's room and throws himself into the chair. "Don't," he says testily, "bother asking me any questions, because apparently you won't remember the answers anyway."

John blinks at him, taken aback enough to swallow whatever barb he'd been about to hurl in Rodney's direction. "Okay," he says, after a bit. He fiddles idly with the straps around his wrists. "So, not a doctor, then?"

"No." Grumpily, Rodney rips open the foil on the pizza. "Is there enough play in those straps for you to eat?"

"I-" John blinks at him again. "Yes. But I already ate. Although whatever it was they gave me wasn't very good."

"No," Rodney says. "You hate the food in here except what you cook yourself." He shoves half the pizza at John. "Here. You made this the other day. You'll like it."

John accepts the pizza dubiously. "Do I cook?"

"I told you not to bother asking me questions," Rodney snaps. He feels guilty at the hurt expression that flashes across John's face. "Sorry. I'm just—" He waves his hand around. "I wasn't expecting this, and I probably should have been, and finding out I was wrong makes me very irritable, which you will learn once you can start remembering me again."

"If you say so." John takes a bite of the pizza, and the glum expression on his face brightens. "It's good."

"I just hope you wrote the recipe down," Rodney sulks. "I'd hate to have to wait for you to invent it again."

~~

John is "acclimating", according to Raku, who Rodney tracks down the morning after his third evening visit to John in which John, again, did not remember him.

"It's a significant neurological trauma," Raku says. "Even when administered in the clinic."

Rodney flashes to John writhing on the ground, screaming, then thinks about all the closed, locked doors in the Facility, the blank stares on the faces of the recently Treated, the clinical, jaded disinterest of the doctors and attendants. He wonders how much different it really is being Treated instead of subdued, whether it's just the setting that draws the distinction, whether Raku is looking for a line that doesn't really exist. "And it's worse for John," he says flatly, "because he got hit with the subduers."

"They're used infrequently. It was unfortunate the officers were so quick to react upon arriving at the scene. They shouldn't have been used on John at all, given his history."

"You said he wasn't an optimal subject for Treatment. Meaning what?"

Raku tightens his lips and glances around, then leads Rodney to a more secluded area in the park. "He'd been Treated four times before this. Once upon arrival, then again a week later, and twice more over the course of the three seasons before he came to you. The latter two were following escape attempts. During the second of those, he attacked four security officers, grievously injuring three of them."

"Including Elsha."

"Yes. Elsha was humiliated, as were they all, although Elsha took it harder than the others, and should have been more extensively counseled. But understand, Rodney, that John should not have been able to—Treatment is designed to break the neural connections in the pathways that control violence, to make inaccessible the memories and abilities that would allow a prisoner to stage and execute such an attack."

"It doesn't work on John very well, then."

"No it doesn't. Occasionally a prisoner will require a second Treatment, but no one has ever required a third, until John. Unfortunately, the doctors have no idea why, which makes his incarceration problematic. The only recourse is repeated Treatments, but the cumulative side effects are a significant deterrent."

"Like the fact that he can't remember anything from one day to the next? Is that permanent?"

Raku draws in a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before releasing it slowly, maybe gathering his thoughts. "The doctors don't believe so, but it's far too early to tell. It's only been a few days." He looks at Rodney, mouth quirking up in something that's maybe half a grin, half a grimace. "What's your first memory after Treatment, Rodney?"

"I-" Rodney stops for a minute, and thinks. He doesn't have any specific first memory, actually, any particular time or place he can point to and say with conviction that it's the first thing he remembers. In his earliest memories, he's already living in the Class Four dorms, already working in the labs. He knows there was orientation, knows there must have been an adjustment period, a time when he had to learn his way around the complex, had to learn the rules and regulations, the structure of his daily routine, but he doesn't remember any of it.

"You're probably missing the first few weeks," Raku says gently. "Short-term memory is the first to return. It takes significantly longer before the neural pathways regenerate sufficiently to allow memories to imprint for the longer term."

"Okay, fine," Rodney says. "But John's not remembering anything at all, not even his own name. And his short-term memory wasn't very good even before this. He couldn't—he had lists all over the place, things to do, when to do them, because otherwise he couldn't remember. It took him a week before he could find his way back to the apartment on his own, and that was a month after his last Treatment."

"As I said, the cumulative effects are of concern. It's why he was given to you in the first place. You were upranked ahead of schedule primarily so he could be placed with you."

Rodney stares, head spinning. "Why? Why with me, specifically? What did you think I could do that your doctors couldn't?"

"It wasn't any one thing, specifically. It is just that you and John are ... not of this region." Raku says this slowly, reluctantly, as if admitting some great and painful secret, and his voice has dropped even lower. "You acclimated well enough, but John was having difficulty and the Council felt—hoped—that by placing you together, it would alleviate some of the stresses that may have been contributing to his continued trouble. It appears," he adds, "that it was working. John has settled some, significantly by some accounts. He has been more focused, more tractable, gaining weight, even."

"He wasn't going to get fat on oola stew," Rodney said sourly. He focuses on this one point, because the rest is too loaded to deal with, throwing everything he'd thought he'd known into turmoil. "If you want the prisoners in the mines to eat better, you should give them food that's actually edible."

"There is nothing wrong with the food in the mines," Raku says with a frown. "It is simple, perhaps a little plain for some, but nutritious and palatable. My wife makes oola stew once a month, at least. It is my eldest daughter's favorite."

Rodney considers this. "John and I must be from very far away then," he says finally. "Because I've tasted oola stew, and I have to tell you, I agree with John."

"You are from very far away indeed," Raku admits. "Though no one suspected it would affect your diet. Fortunately it does appear that you also have gained weight on John's cooking."

Rodney is minutely offended, even though Raku clearly means no disparagement, and it is also very evidently true. Rodney wonders if this is some sociological aspect of his former life peeking through, because there is no stigma associated with excess weight in the compound; no stigma associated with weight at all unless a person has so little or so much as to be unhealthy. He does not mention this to Raku, because now more than ever he is afraid that if he admits to having an occasional flash of blurry memory, even if it is so indistinct as to be inarticulable, that he will find himself waking up in the Facility again himself.

He asks the next question without any expectation of receiving an answer, asking it anyway because the possibility of getting an answer is still positive, though infinitesimally small. "Were John and I convicted of the same crime?"

Raku frowns at him. "You know I can't tell you that."

"Can you at least tell me if we knew each other? You said we were from the same region, very far away from here. It seems a big coincidence."

"Coincidence or not, I can't give you any details of your life before, as you well know. I have already told you far more than I should have." Raku looks at the nearest chronometer, and says, "And we have spent far too long in conversation. You will be late for work if you do not hurry."

Rodney leaves without another word, because his supervisor is very particular about his hours. He gets to the labs just in time, but if he gets any work done at all during the next eight hours, it's by sheer unconscious accident.

~~

That evening, Rodney tries his hand at cooking. There is a pasta dish John is partial to, made with the same red sauce he uses for the pizza, served with small balls of ground fried veela meat. John has no recipe written down, but there is extra sauce in the fridge, and leftover veela patties available at a discount from the commissary.

Rodney samples the meatballs before taking them John, and decides that even though he hasn't gotten the spices quite right, the result is still pretty good, certainly good enough for someone who's eating ifflet root soup every day for dinner, "as a neurological restorative," one attendant told them with a smirk.

This night's attendant is the bored-looking woman, and she pays Rodney no attention as he sails into John's room. "Before you ask," he says, placing the pot of food carefully down on the nightstand, "no, I'm not a doctor, and if they haven't already told you you've got a friend who keeps coming by to visit you, you do, and I'm him."

"You're Rodney," John says, after a moment of what Rodney interprets to be baffled silence.

"Yes!" Rodney is excited at this evidence that John's memory has started to work again. After the morning's conversation with Raku, he had half convinced himself that John's memory might never start to work again at all. "You remembered!"

"No," John says. He still sounds baffled. "They said my former supervisor would probably be stopping by to visit, and that his name was Rodney. They didn't say you'd be so loud. Is that food?"

"Oh," Rodney says. He deflates a little. John's memory is not working after all. "Yes, it's food. I'm guessing you still don't care for the ifflet soup."

"What, I've had that before?" John shudders. "You'd think I'd have remembered anything that foul."

"You probably blocked it out on purpose."

Cooking dinner cost Rodney an entire hour, so he has only a little while to spend with John, but by the time the attendant comes in to kick him out, he's gotten a sense of who John is today. Each day sees the aspects of John's personality integrate a little better; every time Rodney visits, John the stranger resolves more into the John Rodney remembers: inquisitive and a little self-deprecating, wry and irreverent.

"I'll be back tomorrow," Rodney promises, hastily cleaning up the plates and silverware as the attendant watches.

"Don't blame me if I don't remember you," John says placidly.

"I'll only hold it against you for a few years," Rodney shoots back. "Promise."

John lifts a middle finger in his direction, and Rodney spends the rest of the night trying to figure out what that means. He has no success, but when he dreams, it's filled with images of John doing the same exact thing. Rodney just wishes he knew if the dreams are genuine memories or hopeful delusions.


	3. Chapter 3

Rodney is a creature of habit, finding comfort in routine, but he's not so slavishly devoted to it that he can't adapt to changes. His old routine mostly involved work, and John, and his new routine is pretty much the same, though entirely different. Work's the same, except for the way Rodney can no longer concentrate on anything and so gets nothing done, not that anyone seems to notice so long as he continues to talk really fast and deride everyone's intelligence. John's not the same at all, except in the way he's always there at the end of Rodney's day, with a smirk and a bad joke. It doesn't seem to matter to John that he can't quite remember Rodney from one day to the next; by the end of the week, he's remembering Rodney's face, if not his name.

John is scribbling with a stylus on a small pad of parchment when Rodney walks in to the clinic exactly one week after the incident in the park. "Hey," John says with a grin. "It's not dinnertime already, is it?"

"I have the afternoon off. I told you yesterday I'd be here early."

"Huh," John says with wide, disingenuous eyes. "I don't remember that."

"Yes, yes, ha ha, very funny, make fun of the memory-impaired."

"Aren't I allowed if I'm the one impaired?"

"Self-hatred is never funny."

"I don't hate myself, Rodney."

"Self-mockery, then. Did you just call me Rodney?"

"Yep."

"Chatting up the attendants again?"

John looks insufferably smug. "Nope."

"Okay, I know your memory hasn't kicked in, because if it did it would have been the first thing out of your mouth when I walked in the door, so, what's going on?"

John holds up the parchment with a flourish. "Got smart last night after you left."

Rodney takes the parchment. It has six small symbols on it, written in a neat line across the middle of the page. "What's this?"

John's grin falters. "It's your name. Isn't it?"

Rodney looks at the symbols some more, sharps lines and rounded curves, asymmetric characters separated by small spaces, very unlike the neat, connected script he writes his notes in. "I don't know. Is it?"

"Sure it is." John grabs the parchment back. "R-O-D-N-E-Y, see? I'm not sure why there's an e, but it didn't look right without it."

Rodney turns John's hand so they can both look at the writing, and gets a slightly sick feeling low and deep in his gut. "This isn't our alphabet, John. It's not how we write. I don't know those letters you just said."

John stares at him dubiously. "It's the only way I know how to write."

Rodney doesn't know the letters, but Raku never said anything about aphasia, and this isn't that, anyway, because John isn't confused, John knows exactly what he's written, and it's Rodney who can't read it, can't understand. And there is also pizza, that John named once without knowing why, that he named again the other day when Rodney brought it by. There is soccer, John's peculiar name for groundball, and there are curses that spring to John's lips that no one else knows, and John had four Treatments before this one, but can still defeat a security officer in a hand-to-hand fight.

Rodney grabs the parchment and stuffs it in a pocket. "Did you show it to anyone?" he asks urgently. He is whispering, even though there is no one else in the room. "The paper. Parchment. Did you show it to anyone?"

"What? No. Rodney, what's going on?"

"Don't tell anyone, all right? Just don't. Don't tell anyone, and for god's sake, don't write anything else down until they teach you how to do it properly."

"I did do it properly," John says grumpily, but he agrees anyway, and they don't speak again of the neat, indecipherable writing. Later that night, alone in bed and with a small light as the only illumination, Rodney stares at the parchment, traces the letters with his finger, trying to burn them into memory, or maybe drag them _out_ of memory, because surely he knew how to write his name in this alphabet once. He is afraid to try it himself, though he's not sure whether the fear is because, with a stylus in his hand, the letters won't come easily at all, or because they will.

Over the next few days, as John settles more and more—"acclimates", John says, up and out of bed now and allowed limited freedom in the ward, though always with a wary security officer close by—it becomes obvious, to Rodney at any rate, that this Treatment, violent and accidental, is going to be no more successful than any of the others. He keeps this to himself, tucks the knowledge away deep in his chest, and never blinks when John starts spouting stupid, trite aphorisms again that Rodney now knows without question are words from some other lifetime.

Rodney doesn't think John knows he's doing it, and the doctors seem equally oblivious, so maybe it's just Rodney who recognizes the quotes for what they are, excerpts from a forgotten past. And that makes the secret, guilty panic in his chest a little stronger too, because he's got his own ghostly flashes of memory, and they are equally forbidden. Rodney's allowed to remember physics and math and science, but he's not allowed to remember his own life; his name is the only piece of it he's been permitted to keep, and even that was torn away by Treatment and had to be given back.

John is ... well, he's John, again, mostly, even if he doesn't remember Rodney from before the fight, even if he doesn't remember himself. The stranger of those first few days, the one with the hostile, wary expression and the cold, assessing gaze has all but vanished. Rodney can't decide if this is who John really is, or if it's just who he's supposed to be here. Maybe, Rodney thinks, maybe John on the outside was that guarded, dispassionate stranger, someone to whom everyone unknown was a potential threat. Maybe this is what Treatment is meant to do, to strip away the hard edges and leave just the softer core. Rodney supposes that there's a soft side to everyone, if you go far enough. But maybe Treatment isn't doing that at all; maybe Treatment is just cutting out the pieces that aren't wanted here, and the Treated are left to rebuild their personalities as best they can from the fragments that are left.

It's enough to make Rodney wonder what he was like before he was Treated, if he was as different then as John is different now. There's a possibility, probability even, that he and John knew each other before they were convicted, and he wonders, perversely, if John liked him back then, if he'd liked John, or if they were merely acquaintances unlucky enough to get caught up and convicted together.

It's pointless and futile and stupid, and it gets him exactly nowhere except around in circles, but sometimes at night there's no way to stop himself from thinking about it. He obsesses to the point that he actually accesses the compound mainframe one night, but his hacking skills don't get him any farther than the information available in the public databases. There's no information on any of the prisoners, no information even on the society that exists outside of the compound, except by oblique reference. Look hard enough, Rodney figures, and he could uncover clues about the people who built this prison that's hardly a prison, but he's not sure what good that does him.

~~

Exactly four weeks after the "unfortunate incident", as Raku has taken to calling it, Rodney walks into John's room in the clinic to find John sprawled in the chair, one leg hooked over the arm, the other stretched out in front. Rodney's back nearly goes into contortions just looking, but he doesn't say anything, because John will just tease him again about having an old man's body.

John grins at him and waves a piece of parchment in his face. "Come to spring me?"

Rodney has no idea what John is talking about. He puts the pot of food he is carrying down on the window sill. "What?"

"I've got my marching orders."

Rodney still has no idea what John is talking about. "I repeat, what?"

"Here." With a few deft folds, John turns the parchment into some sort of flying device, and tosses it across the room. It floats gently and precisely through the air, curving up to follow invisible air currents, then falls, neatly, at Rodney's feet. Rodney leans over and picks it up without comment—in general, it's best to ignore John's eccentricities; commenting on them just encourages him, and this hasn't changed one bit post-Treatment—and unfolds it, smoothing it out against his leg.

A quick scan is enough to get the gist, and to release a huge knot of tension from Rodney's chest that he hasn't realized was there. "They assigned you back to me."

"Yep." John springs to his feet, bouncy and eager. "Let's go. Do you realize it feels like I've spent most of my life inside this room?"

"Wait a minute, just wait for one minute. Don't you, I don't know, need to go to orientation or something?" Rodney has no memories of his own orientation, but he knows he went for the requisite week, knows that without it he'd have had no idea of how to accomplish the most daily activities, like finding where to get food and clothing and things like soap and toilet paper. He has a moment of panic that he is expected to teach these things to John now, that this is Raku's subtle way of taking revenge, though none of this is Rodney's fault, at all.

"Been there," John says cheerfully. "Every day this past week. I couldn't be more oriented. Except for the whole problem with remembering directions and things. You'll need to draw me a map if you actually expect me to leave your apartment and find my way back home again."

"What do you mean, you've been to orientation? I—you haven't said a word. The whole week! I thought you were, I don't know, making pots or something."

John squints at him. "Pots? Why would I be making pots?"

"Physical therapy! How am I supposed to know why?"

John squints some more. "But why pots? Have you ever seen anyone in here with a pot of any kind?"

"Ninety-five percent of the doors in this clinic are kept closed all the time," Rodney says sourly. "There could be thousands of pots here."

"Nobody asked me to make even one pot," John says. Then he cocks his head and lifts an eyebrow simultaneously, which would look ridiculous on anyone else, in fact looks ridiculous on John, but also looks stupidly endearing. Rodney thinks he might be biased in this regard. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want to get your hopes up. Until three days ago I thought they were sending me back to the mines. And then ... well, I didn't know until this morning they were letting me go back with you. The attendants kept making it sound like there was no chance of that, and Raku wouldn't answer any questions directly, so ..." He shrugs gracefully, one sculpted shoulder lifting up and down, muscles playing nicely under the pale blue of the clinic uniform.

Rodney thinks it is sweet that John didn't want to get his, Rodney's, hopes up. Rodney hadn't wanted to get his own hopes up either, and had been no more optimistic that John would be assigned back to him. Raku had been strangely mute on the topic, no matter how hard Rodney had pressed; Rodney wonders now if Raku had actually pulled favors to get this posting for John, if they will owe him now. If so, if there is to be some accounting in the future, Rodney will gladly pay it, because these past few weeks without John have made the compound feel like prison for the first time.

"Let's go, then," Rodney says, absently refolding the paper along the creases and tossing it back to John (it does not fly as straight or as well, but John stretches easily and catches it without a word). "I brought dinner, but we can eat it at home."

John just grins at him, a quirky half smile, and follows Rodney obediently out the door. Rodney suggests taking public transport but John wants to walk. "I want to see this place, Rodney," and Rodney doesn't have the heart to tell him that there's nothing very exciting to see at all; any one part of the compound looks pretty much like every other. John drinks it all in anyway, wide-eyed, and Rodney has to keep reminding himself that from John's perspective, it's the first time he's ever been out of the clinic and seen the tall, stark towers that define their lives: apartments and labs and offices, infirmaries and commissaries and supply depots.

John's steps falter when they pass the first neatly squared-off public park. "Is there where it happened?"

"No." Rodney keeps walking, and John reluctantly follows. "Not this one. All the parks look the same, though."

He catches John looking over his shoulder as they keep moving, and John checks out every park after that one, looking for something, a memory perhaps, but if something looks familiar or sparks some recollection, he keeps it to himself.

"Jesus," John swears when they finally reach Rodney's apartment and Rodney toes open the door. Rodney does not comment on John's choice of swear words. He has already told John to be careful what he says around other people; John says he never says anything inappropriate around anyone else, that it's only around Rodney that he forgets. Or remembers. "You live here? Like this?"

Rodney takes a look around, realizing belatedly that perhaps he's let things slip a bit in the past month. It does look a little like a bomb hit the living room. It's even possible, Rodney thinks, that he got so used to having John clean up after him that it never occurred to him to do it on his own without John there. "Sorry," he says awkwardly, putting the pot of stew on the table and hurriedly grabbing some of the clothing off the floor. "I wasn't expecting you to come back with me tonight. Or I would have cleaned."

John looks dubiously at the piles of parchment strewn all over the floor, at the scientific journals littering the couch. "That's okay," he says faintly. "It'll give me something to do for the next couple of days." Rodney thinks for no particular reason of John's small room in the clinic, which was always as spotless as if nobody was staying there at all, John's small supply of clothing and grooming items always away and out of sight, the bed always made with those funny square corners John insists on, the towel folded neatly over the shower rod. He guesses John's fanatic orderliness is something inbred, because certainly Rodney's own Treatment hasn't imbued a tendency for it in him.

Then it's a little awkward, because John follows Rodney around the apartment as Rodney grabs for the worst of the mess, and it becomes an impromptu tour. For a minute, as Rodney shows off the rooms—"here's the lavatory. Wait, I'll just pick that up, hold on, see, there's the shower"—John gets that analytical look again, like he's filing everything away, assessing every possible entrance and exit to the small set of rooms. But then they're through the apartment—"Here, this half of the dresser is yours, and you keep some other stuff in the closet"—and by the time Rodney's got the stew on the stove, the assessment is over, and the new, old John has returned, settling into the kitchen like he never left, sniffing all the spices one by one, tasting the stew as it reheats and humming under his breath as he adds a dash of this and that.

It's quite late by the time they're done eating. John cleans the kitchen, refusing Rodney's offer to help—"It's not rocket science, Rodney. I'll figure out where everything belongs. Go relax."—while Rodney furtively scrubs the lavatory sink and eliminates every last crumbly speck of tooth powder from the mirror.

It is really only at the point that John emerges from the bathroom, loose clinic pants barely hanging on his hips, the shirt dangling from one hand, that Rodney thinks, "Oh," and looks around the small, single bedroom with something like dismay.

John tosses the shirt to the chair in the corner where, improbably, it lands neatly on the back, and crosses the room to where Rodney's sitting on the bed. Rodney looks up at John, who's looking back down at him, speculation and nervousness battling on his face. "Um," Rodney says, swallowing. "Okay, so it's like this."

John raises an eyebrow again and sinks down to his knees, nestled in between Rodney's thighs. "What's it like, Rodney?"

It's incredibly disconcerting having John between his legs, even though he's not doing anything except resting there. "Well, you've probably noticed that there's only the one bed."

"Soon as I came in," John says easily, and of _course_ he would have noticed and not said anything. "I figured if I was supposed to sleep on the couch, you'd have pointed it out to me."

Stupidly, Rodney says, "You're way too tall to sleep on the couch," and then John is leaning in and kissing him, slowly and carefully. It's almost a little clinical, until John starts using tongue and then it's not clinical at all.

"Huh," John says, pulling back. He runs his tongue over his lips thoughtfully. With calm deliberation, he places his hands on Rodney's thighs, one on either side. The warmth of his fingers soaks right through the thin summer pajamas Rodney's wearing, but there's no pressure, just John's fingers resting lightly on trembling muscles. "Did we used to do this?"

"We ..." Rodney is having a little trouble finding words. "Yes. We did. But not at first. And that doesn't mean ... you don't have to."

"I kind of thought I did," John says, and there it is, he cocks his head to one side again, hazel eyes dark and contemplative. "In orientation, they said you'd expect it."

"Well, I don't," Rodney says stubbornly. He has found his voice again, and plenty of words along with it. "We did this, yes, but that was before, when you knew who you were, more or less, and you knew who I was. It was your choice. It wasn't ... it wasn't because you had to. It wasn't because it was _expected_."

"That kind of sucks," John murmurs. "Because I've recently learned that I'm going to be locked up for the rest of my life for a crime I can't remember committing, and I'm going to be spending my days washing your dirty laundry, and the one bright spot about all of that is that there's supposed to be regular sex. Which I don't remember, but I have on good authority I'll really enjoy."

"You won't spend your days washing my laundry," Rodney says, stupid again, and wondering briefly who'd been talking to John about sex, and was that really part of the Class Two orientation? "I don't have that much clothing."

"Did I ever tell you that you talk too much?" John says, leaning in again.

"At least once a day," Rodney mumbles against John's lips, and then John's tongue is back and he can't say anything else at all for quite some time.

~~

John is not there when Rodney wakes up the next morning, and Rodney spends a minute panicking, convinced that he has somehow dreamed the whole thing, that in his impatience to get John back he's fabricated a reality in which it's happened. But then the smell of tava wafts into the bedroom, and Rodney relaxes. He goes into the kitchen and John is there, sipping at a cup of brewed tava beans, peering into the mug with interest. "I can't exactly say I missed this," he offers, swiveling to pour a cup for Rodney in one smooth, economical motion, "but it feels like I should have."

Rodney accepts the mug gratefully. The drink is hot and spicy, warming him from the inside out. "How did you know?" he asks, because he had left no instructions, no mortar and pestle on the countertop, no filters or beans.

John holds up a small bound notebook, looking a little guilty, though that is too strong a word for the quick expression that flits across his face. "I left myself notes. Sort of."

"Notes?" Rodney repeats, with interest. He takes the book from John's hands.

"They're mostly recipes," John says, sounding a little rueful. With the mug held up to his mouth, Rodney can't see his face.

Rodney flips the notebook open, but he can't understand anything in it. It is filled with the same neat, blocky writing as the fragment of parchment Rodney had snatched away in the clinic, and this, Rodney thinks, is significant. This is important, that John remembered these letters even before he was Treated again, that they came back to him so quickly afterwards.

Rodney sees his own name in and among the foreign text, the shape of the letters familiar to him after hours spent tracing them in the dim light of his bedroom, but they're just shapes, symbols he's been told have meaning. _John remembers this_ , he tells himself fiercely, _he remembered this before. You should remember it too_. But staring at the script makes it no less incomprehensible, although there are things he guesses are numbers, and for them recollection stirs faintly, sluggishly. But of course, they are numbers, the alphabet of his work much more than any letters could be, so maybe that distant sense of familiarity should not be so much of a surprise.

"I've never seen this book," Rodney says, and he hopes his tone doesn't sound as accusatory to John as it does to his own ears. But he has been living in this apartment for weeks, fending for himself, and he has never stumbled across this, so how can John have found it so soon upon his return to a place he professes not to remember?

"You wouldn't have," John says, "unless you were in the habit of rummaging around below the sink behind the cleaning supplies." It goes without saying that Rodney is not; from John's expression, Rodney supposes John has a pretty good idea that Rodney doesn't even know what half of the bottle and jars beneath the sink contain. "I thought it might say something. About me."

It does, Rodney thinks, even if it's nothing but recipes and laundry tips. It says something because John wrote it in a language Rodney doesn't know, and John found it in its hiding place when it would never have even occurred to Rodney to look for it in the first place.

"But it doesn't say anything," John says with a sigh. "Except that I used to cook a lot, and I thought I was getting better it."

Rodney thinks, but doesn't ask, "What does it say about me?" because if John wanted him to know, he would tell him. And John, who when he looks sees everything that matters, has surely seen Rodney's finger stumble lightly across the characters of his own name; John must know that Rodney recognizes it. Rodney's name is there on the first page and there on the second, again on the third if not the fourth. Why, Rodney wonders, would his name appear in a book of recipes unless recipes are not all they are?

"Don't show it to anyone," Rodney says, and hands the book back with a mild twinge of regret. "They won't like knowing you've been writing it like this."

"Yeah, okay." John turns the book over and over in his hands, and his face looks wistful. It makes Rodney ache a little bit, because he has never felt the burning desire John seems to feel to remember, and he feels now that it's a flaw, a loss. The flashes of memory he gets, tantalizing and frustrating, don't prompt in him the desire for deeper self-reflection; if in his former life he was the sort of man to earn a sentence here, he's not so sure he's worth remembering in more vivid detail. Except he wonders now if that's really how he feels, or if it's just how Treatment has made him feel, and even that thought is strange, because he thinks it should have occurred to him before now, and it is peculiar that it hasn't.

"I made eggs," John says, and he has, maybe when Rodney was sleeping, or maybe just now, when Rodney was lost in thought, but in any case, there are eggs, over easy, the yolks still runny and the whites firm and moist, and there is toast too, though Rodney is surprised he had any bread that has not developed mold.

"Is this in the book too?" Rodney asks around a mouthful of crunchy toast slathered with eggs.

"Toast?" John is not eating, but he's pulled the chair out across from Rodney and is sipping at his mug of tava. "No, they told us about toast in orientation."

Rodney stares. "They did not."

John grins. "No, but it would have been funny if they had. You have to go to work soon?"

"Very soon," Rodney admits. A glance at the chronometer shows that he is actually veering towards being late. "You'll be okay here?"

"Me and the mess will be fine," John says. The downcast expression in his eyes doesn't match the lightness of his voice. "We'll have a little quality bonding time. Can you draw me a map to the quartermaster's?"

"Sure." Rodney grabs a blank piece of parchment and a stylus, sketches out the streets and buildings with thick, broad strokes, labeling everything he can think of and drawing big arrows to the apartment and the quartermaster's. He wants to ask John if he will really be okay here by himself, but he doesn't have time to deal with the answer if it turns out to be no. "Ask if you get lost, all right?"

"I won't get lost," John says, studying the map. "My memory's impaired, but I'm not stupid. I can read a map."

"I know you can. I'm, uh, a little short on rations right now. Spent a lot buying food. I think I'm on account, actually."

John shrugs. "I've got plenty. They were accumulating the whole month I was in the clinic. Even as a Class Two, that's enough for me to get a couple of steaks."

Rodney perks up. "Steaks?" He shovels the last few bites of egg into his mouth, to John's disapproving look. Rodney's poor table manners have always been a matter of contention between them—John's fastidiousness at the table and his insistence that Rodney act accordingly is yet another instance where John completely and utterly fails to act like a servant.

"It's Third Day. Bisa steaks. According to the book, you like them grilled." He sounds a little hopeless, but is trying hard to hide it. "First time out by myself. It'll be a real adventure."

~~

Minutes later, Rodney's ready to leave, and John is in the kitchen cleaning, ignoring him. Rodney feels a little guilty leaving John in the apartment, because John is clearly having some trouble getting comfortable with the idea of staying here alone. But Rodney knows something that John does not: John was very comfortable home alone in Rodney's apartment _before_ , cooking and cleaning and doing laundry and whatever other things people who stayed home all day did; Rodney is fairly confident that John, once he starts actually doing all those things, will find out that he is still very comfortable with the situation.

So Rodney leaves John home, and catches a transport at the very last second, getting into the lab close enough to on time so that he won't get docked. And then he thinks a little bit about John home in the mess Rodney has made, but he doesn't think about it too long, because when John first came to live with him, Rodney would be treated to a display of cleansing every night, John showing off exactly what he'd cleaned and organized, making sure Rodney appreciated the improvement. Obviously, no one would take such pride in something as mundane as cleaning if he didn't on some level enjoy it. This ties in neatly with John's observed (fanatical) level of neatness, so Rodney is not unduly concerned about John's frame of mind.

Then Rodney gets involved with the particle accelerator modifications, and stops thinking about John at all, until he gets off the transport at the end of the day and he realizes that he doesn't have to cook dinner or go to the clinic. John will be waiting for him at home, with dinner ready. This puts him in a good mood, and he hurries up a little to get home just a few minutes faster.

The smell of bisa steaks hits him before he's up the stairs, and it's with a warm feeling of contentment that he opens the door to his apartment. "John? I'm home."

John emerges from the kitchen, wiping his hand on his towel, a smear of grease across his cheek and flour all over his shirt. "You're early," he says, surprised but not petulant. "You never made it to the clinic before 1915, 1930 even."

"I had to cook for you when you were at the clinic. It took time," Rodney says defensively. "But I get off work at 1745. Transport only takes ten minutes."

"You should have told me," John says, heading back into the kitchen. "Dinner's not quite ready." There's the squeak of the oven door opening and closing. "Almost, though."

The table is set and all the journals and parchments have been stacked into neat piles around the room. It is homey and familiar and _right_ , and Rodney sits down to dinner feeling that all is right with the world. It's only better that night, when John does something in bed that took him weeks to figure out the first time around, and Rodney, when he can talk again, says suspiciously, "Was that in that journal of yours?"

Rodney can feel John's grin against his skin, but he doesn't answer.

~~

The thing is, Rodney thinks to himself one Fourth day towards the end of the season, it should be getting _better_. John's been back for weeks now, and they've got their patterns re-established. But as time goes on, John's getting more and more restless, more tense and irritable. He always keeps his temper in check with Rodney but it's an obvious effort, and sometimes, Rodney thinks, John's glad to see him leave in the morning, which is a change Rodney doesn't welcome at all.

John's always glad when Rodney comes home, though, and the apartment has never been this brutally clean. When everything has been organized down to the microscopic level, John decides to repaint the walls and ceilings. It takes him longer than it should because he's spending more time in the kitchen; the ingredients they get don't vary all that much but John's meals are getting more and more complex, the experimental combinations more and more outrageous.

In bed at night, John's equally inventive and outrageous, like he's determined to wring every drop of sensation out of their bodies. He throws himself into their bedplay with as much focused energy as he does everything else; sometimes it's actually too focused, too much energy. Sometime Rodney wishes they could go back to nights of lazy, gentle sex, the kind that don't make him feel like he's entered a sex competition without knowing about it.

"What's going on?" he asks John finally, after a two-hour marathon in bed that has left him sated and exhausted and a little overwhelmed. John's sitting up, pulling on some pants—the dirty pots soaking in the sink are his excuse—and every muscle in his back is tense. Rodney reaches out to touch him. "It doesn't matter about the pots."

"I can't sleep with dirty dishes in the sink," John says obdurately, but the tension in his back tells Rodney that this is a lie, or a sort of lie. John is pathologically clean these days, in ways that makes the old John look like a slob, but dirty pots in the sink do not classify as something to keep him up at night, because in the sink the mess is contained and the cleaning therefore deferrable.

"They'll still be there in the morning," Rodney says, trying for lighthearted, but this is the wrong thing to say, because John's muscles tighten up even further, and the next breath he draws in is deep and ragged, like it hurts.

"I don't like waking up to dirty dishes," John says. "It's like I'm falling behind before I've even started."

"You're just going to be cleaning all day anyway," Rodney says, regretting the words the second they're out of his mouth, because John, impossibly, goes even more tense and rigid. _I didn't mean it like that_ , Rodney wants to say, but doesn't. _I didn't mean that the way it sounded._

There is a silence that is filled with a hundred apologies Rodney can't bring himself to utter before John speaks in clipped, precise words, "It will only take a little while. But if you tell me to come to bed now, I'll come to bed."

And ... ouch, Rodney thinks. Because most days, John never acknowledges that he's the servant here, even though it's obvious in a hundred different ways. Theoretically, Rodney's no happier having a servant than he ever was, but practically, he's grown complacent about it, because it's _John_ , who is nothing like a servant at all; he's more like a roommate or a spouse. Rodney never gives him orders, doesn't even give him lists of things to do. John does what wants to do—which, yes, maybe those are mostly things for Rodney, the things he feels he _needs_ to do, but it's still like a partnership, isn't it? Except maybe to John it's not like a partnership at all. Maybe he's cooking and cleaning for Rodney not because he wants to, but because that's his job and he doesn't have a choice.

"You don't have to come to bed if you don't want to," Rodney says, feeling chilled, even though he hates the thought of going to bed alone. "If you want to clean the pots, clean the pots." John doesn't move or say anything, and Rodney very much wishes he could see his face. "I could help you."

"Jesus," John swears, suddenly angry, fury radiating off him in waves. He surges to his feet. Rodney still can't see his face. "I don't want your help with the damn pots." Then he leaves, and Rodney's left behind, coming to the slow, unwelcome conclusion that John is utterly unhappy here, that all the tension and irritability and desperate, punishing sex are because John is miserable and he doesn't know what to do about it.

Rodney lies awake for a long time, guilty and miserable, listening to the sound of water running for far, far longer than it should take to wash every single pot Rodney owns. In the morning, he guesses, the pots will be scrubbed clean and shining like new: John's peace offering and penance molded in burnished copper.

It's nearly 2800 by the time John comes to bed, all that restless energy finally scoured away. He climbs quietly into bed, but doesn't say anything, not even when Rodney rolls over to face him, inches away.

In the dark, it's easier to say what he couldn't earlier. "Sorry," Rodney whispers, and even though that one word is not nearly big enough to encompass the enormity of what he wants to convey, it is a start.

John doesn't answer, but he breathes out a long, slow sigh, and laces his fingers through Rodney's. It's as close to acknowledgment and acceptance as Rodney's going to get.

~~

"Look," Rodney says to Raku the very next morning after a tense breakfast in which Rodney made multiple attempts at inane conversation, and John sipped his tava in silence and nodded occasionally without any sign that he was actually listening. "You've got to find John some other assignment. He's going crazy, trapped in my apartment all day."

Raku looks puzzled. "Serving you is his task, Rodney. It's what he will be evaluated on. If he's not doing a good job-"

"He's doing a _fantastic_ job. I seriously doubt there is anyone here who is doing a better job. It's just not the right job for him. Can't you get him back on sanitation detail?"

This is something Rodney would never in a million years have guessed he would ever do: beg for John to go back to cleaning someone else's dirty toilets. But here he is, asking if not quite begging. In retrospect, Rodney realizes that having a reason to leave the apartment, somewhere to go, something to do (even if it is gross and smelly) is important to John in a way Rodney never considered menial labor could be. But in those early days with Rodney, John had never complained about going back to the mines, even though it left him filthy and exhausted, and later on he'd actually been happy on the days he'd had time enough to report for sanitation duty.

At the time, Rodney had supposed, foolishly, that John's willingness to go and do extra work—dirty, dangerous, unpleasant work, even—was because he wanted to be promoted, and working in a more visible support role was a means toward that end. But now Rodney thinks he had it wrong, because John's lost the desperate need to make Class Three—maybe because he doesn't remember the mines and has no real sense of what life is like there—but he still has the same drive tobe doing something _more_.

Raku shakes his head slowly. "He was downranked after the fight, Rodney. He doesn't qualify for sanitation duty anymore."

"Downranked? Why? That wasn't his fault! We've been through this!"

"It has nothing to do with whose fault it was. We have rules. Procedures. John's situation is complicated."

"I'm sure it is. But-"

"The Council wanted to put him back in the mines, Rodney. In the Class One pits."

"What?" Rodney is horrified. "People die in the pits all the time."

"Not all the time," Raku says with a frown. "Not nearly so often as rumor would have you believe. But it is an arduous life. That's why I fought so hard to prevent it. In my opinion his original crime does not nearly justify that sentence. I argued that he'd made significant progress with you, and that he would continue to progress if he was permitted to return to your service. Ultimately the Council agreed with me, but I had to fight to keep him out of the mines for supplementary service." Raku sighs. "If you are saying he would prefer to return I am sure we could arrange-"

"No." Which is a lie, because Rodney is sure now that John would in fact prefer to return to the mines for a few hours a week, even if it means coming home covered with silian dust again, so long as it means getting out of Rodney's apartment for a little while. But that's because John doesn't remember the mines. It's because he's desperate. Rodney remembers, and moreover is more concerned with John's welfare than John is himself, so going back to the mines is out.

"Then I don't know what else I can do for him," Raku says. "Please understand that the Council will not jeopardize our entire penal system for the sake of one man. The hope is that in your service John will continue to stabilize and will eventually be given the opportunity for another assignment that is not so limiting."

Rodney nods, reluctantly, as if he agrees, but he is lying again. He thinks he has lied more in the past day than he has all the rest of his life, at least the small portion of his life he can remember. John will not stabilize in Rodney's service, unless it is towards the person he once was. Rodney guesses John is calmer in his presence than away from it, but that, Rodney thinks, is because on some level Rodney is familiar to John in a way the rest of the people here are not.

Raku says they are from the same place, very far away; Rodney is starting to wonder if it is so far away that they will never really fit in here, no matter how many times they are Treated. Certainly John in Rodney's presence is more prone to swearing in a foreign language that neither of them remembers, and John has again taken up practicing with the short sticks, stretching and bending and reaching, curling his body through movements that come from somewhere else, some place far away from this one.

Whether it's actually a direct result of them living together, Rodney can't say for sure. He's got nothing that counts as proof. But Rodney didn't have his first flash of memory until after John came to live with him, and Rodney is certain that is not coincidence.

It's proximity that makes it happen, Rodney guesses; not physical proximity necessarily, but emotional proximity, living with someone, sharing experiences. The body remembers; memories aren't erased, they've just been misplaced. The brain, resentful, tries to get back what's been lost; it's like hunting through a haystack for a needle (whatever a haystack is; it's just a word, like pizza, with nothing concrete to attach to it, but the metaphor is clear in Rodney's head, and he's sure John would know what it means): you can look and look forever and never find anything except by random luck, but if you've got a magnet and the needle's made of steel, then all of a sudden you've got a chance of success. And if there are a hundred needles in that haystack, a thousand, a lifetime full of them, then you're going to find something with the magnet, even if it's not the particular needle you were looking for.

Treatment doesn't work well on John. Why, Rodney doesn't know, but it's inarguable, incontrovertible: John remembers things Treatment would have him forget. The information's still there—Rodney knows it's there in his own head, too—and John's learning how to access it, over and over, finding alternate pathways, routes across the broken bridges littering his neural landscape.

Raku and the others placed John with Rodney because they think it will settle him, but it's that proximity problem again: the more time John spends with Rodney, the more his neurons stretch and flare and contort, twisting and turning and stretching to make new connections among themselves. Rodney makes a comment and there's a part of John's brain that flares up in recognition, burns bright; it's like a beacon lighting up, and there's another part that's been searching for that beacon for months and now can finally find it, so then _boom_ , the connection's reforged.

It's working on Rodney too, not as quickly maybe, not as predictably, not as well, but it's the only thing that makes sense, the only way to explain the flashes of memory that come more easily and more often the longer John is there. Over time, maybe they'll get it all back. A few seasons from now, or maybe many seasons from now, they'll have their present, their _now_ , but they'll also have their _then_. But only if John can stay with Rodney, only if John doesn't implode first.

Raku is staring at him silently, thoughtfully. "They are always short of day laborers in the fields," he says after a little thought. "The work is grueling, and half shifts are not permitted. It is harder in many ways than working in the mines."

"But no silian dust?" Rodney is hopeful.

"No," Raku says. "No silian dust."

"I'll ask him," Rodney says. But he already knows the answer.

~~

"The fields, huh?" John says that night. "Hot out there." But he doesn't mean it. Rodney is the one who minds the heat; John strips off his shirt and turns his face to the sun, with blatant disregard for what Rodney claims are the harmful effects of solar radiation. And John—god, just the _mention_ that he might have something else to do one or two days a week, even if it's hard physical labor, hoeing fields, pulling weeds, milling grain—John is already out there, in his head.

"But think of the perks," Rodney says, like he's trying to convince John, like he believes John needs convincing. "Rumor is all your meals are fresh prepared on the farm. And once a week you can get your rations in fruits and vegetables."

"We get plenty of fruits and vegetables," John says. "We could get more, but you don't eat them."

"Fruits and vegetables," Rodney says, "are good in moderation, but should not be confused with your four basic food groups."

"Three of which are some form of tava beans," John says dryly.

"Hey," Rodney says. "Tava is the one substance which makes me consider-"

"-the possibility that there is a God," John finishes, rolling his eyes. "Sorry, Rodney. No disrespect intended."

"None taken," Rodney says, and means it. His mind is whirling, because John had known what he was going to say, even though Rodney would swear, _swear_ , that he's never said this thing before. Which proves nothing that Rodney hasn't already suspected anyway: he and John knew each other before they were convicted; he and John had known each other well. Well enough to know each other's habits, to finish each other's sentences. But Rodney doesn't even think John realizes he's doing it. Maybe it's because Rodney's been here from the beginning this time, right after Treatment. There's been no time for John to establish individual patterns and habits separate and distinct from Rodney. He's just fallen right back into patterns of behavior that he can't even remember.

Rodney stares for a minute at John, who's turned back to the scale drawing of the apartment he's been working on in preparation for further home repairs and renovations.

After a minute, John twitches and looks up. "What? Do you need me to do something?"

"No," Rodney says. "Well, yes. What's the first law of thermodynamics?"

John raises an eyebrow up high. "Law of conservation of energy? You really want me to teach you basic physics?"

"No, no. I was just checking. Some moron in the lab today had never heard of it."

"My advice would be to keep him away from the particle accelerators, then," John says, and goes back to his drawing.

Rodney stares a little longer at John, who is now pretending not to notice. Because it wasn't only one moron in the lab who hadn't heard of the first law, it was all of the morons in the lab. And they'd looked at him like he was the crazy one, skeptical enough that Rodney had started doubting himself. But John had known, and John, who whatever he had been in his previous life, hadn't been an astrophysicist, had called it basic physics.

_Which means what_ , Rodney wonders. Maybe nothing. Or maybe that he and John are from somewhere so far away, that even basic physics are different there.

Which is ridiculous, he thinks. Because physics is the same everywhere. It doesn't change from country to country or continent to continent.

John pokes him. "Okay, now you're starting to scare me."

Rodney jerks his head up. "Huh?"

"With the creepy stalker staring. If there's something you want to ask me, or something you want me to do ... it is my job, after all."

"No. I was just thinking."

John taps his stylus against the paper. "If you don't want me to work in the fields-"

"I didn't say that. I didn't even _think_ that."

"It's all right, Rodney. I know it's going to be inconvenient for you-"

"Inconvenient for me? You're the one who's going to have to get up at 500 to catch the transport."

"Yeah, but I won't be here to cook for you."

"All right, for one? I survived on my own for several seasons before you came to live here. Two, I survived on my own for a month when you were in the clinic and, if you recall, _I_ cooked for _you_. And three, I don't eat all my meals at home even when you _are_ here. I will be absolutely fine without you."

John stares at him very hard, like he's trying to ferret out the lie, but then he shrugs one shoulder and says, like he doesn't really believe it, "If you say so."


	4. Chapter 4

It would be an exaggeration to say everything gets better immediately. It would even be an exaggeration to say it's all better a few weeks in, when they've got their new schedules worked out and John's learned his way around the fields. But it's still much better than it had been, and that, Rodney reflects, is a good thing.

If John is still occasionally irritable, if he seems sometimes to resent working in the fields almost as much as working in Rodney's apartment, if he seems every once in a while to forcibly contort himself back into the role of servant, then maybe that's just the way he is now. It's different than he was before, but different doesn't mean worse, even if he's a little less easy to live with than he used to be. Rodney likes challenges; also, John feels a little more genuine to Rodney now, more like a real person, less like someone who's been programmed to act a certain way.

Most days, though, John's a lot happier than he was. He goes to the fields two days a week, and on those days Rodney doesn't see him until late, after dinner, when he comes home filthy and exhausted and aching. Raku wasn't kidding: they work people hard in the fields. John's more tired on those days than he ever was after a day in the mines, so tired that he's barely got the energy to drag himself into the shower, and there is never any conversation or sex on those nights—there's really hardly any interaction at all. John heads straight for the shower and then straight for bed, and it doesn't matter, on those nights, whether Rodney's ready for bed himself or not.

The sun's turning John's skin bronze while the work's reshaping his body, broadening his shoulders, thinning his waist. "You look like a model," Rodney says one morning after John gets out of the shower.

"A model what?" John asks. He pulls the towel from around his waist and rubs it through his hair, exposing the rest of his tanned, glistening body.

Rodney swallows hard, and looks away. "That's completely unfair. I'm leaving for work in three minutes."

"Sorry," John says, but he is completely unrepentant, although he does wrap the towel back around his waist, restoring a little bit of modesty and some of Rodney's self-control. "A model what?"

"Oh. Just, you know." Rodney waves his hand around vaguely. "A model. Someone who stands around and looks pretty for a living."

John sounds interested. "People do that?"

"Sure." Although Rodney isn't actually completely sure about it, because certainly nobody does that in the compound, but he's pretty sure there are people who do it somewhere, and it's definitely not a concept he would have made up himself. This is just one more item on the list of things he can't talk about with anybody but John. The list is pretty long by now.

"Sounds boring," John says. "And unproductive."

"God forbid," Rodney says dryly. John is all about being productive. Even moreso, now. The long days in the fields are burning away his chronic restlessness, but he's still got more energy than he knows what to do with.

"You're going to be late," John says. He flicks the towel over his shoulder and walks, bare-assed, into the bedroom. "I'm making ita root casserole for dinner tonight," he calls out from the other room. "Picked the roots myself. And ice cream for dessert. Don't be late."

"I'm never late for ice cream," Rodney calls back. And then he curses, because he's going to be late for work if he doesn't leave right now.

~~

Mid-day comes, time for lunch, but Rodney's deep in some theoretical calculations and doesn't want to leave, so he's all alone in the lab, snacking on a nutrition bar, when an Administrative Aide shows up. "Inmate," she says formally, "the Administrator Raku has requested your presence in his office."

Rodney doesn't panic. Much. But Raku's never sent for him before; Raku is always wandering around, and just seems to show up at random. Rodney hadn't even realized Raku _had_ an office, although obviously he must. All the other Administrators do, in the big, gleaming Administrative Tower. Nothing good ever comes of being called there, though, and the stiff, formal way the Aide is speaking doesn't bode well either.

Except Rodney hasn't done anything that would warrant such a summons. "Is it John?" he asks, shutting down the computer in a hurry. "Is he okay? Did something happen?"

"I was not advised of the reason you were summoned," she says. "Only that you were."

"Right. Of course. But are you sure Raku didn't say _anything_ informative? Like maybe if I'm in trouble? Although I can't imagine why I would be, because I have been following all the rules. Except, okay, maybe I have been eating a few too many meals at home each week but I'm only using the rations I've been given, and I don't see how it can be held against me that we eat leftovers."

"The sooner we reach the Administrator's office," the Aide says primly, "the sooner you will learn why you were summoned there."

Rodney worries the entire way there, for the long walk down the narrow thoroughfare that leads to the central transport hub, and all during the short ride to the central Administrative Tower. It's a fairly long trip, and Rodney has an extensive imagination, so by the time they reach the Tower, Rodney has worked himself up into a huge hypothetical panic. Since Rodney can't seriously believe he will be punished for a food-related infraction, most of his panic is centered around something bad having happened to John.

Rodney has only ever been to the Tower once that he can recall, on the day he was upranked from a support position to a supervisory one, and it has grown no less foreboding in the interim. There are personal transport vehicles parked all around the building's perimeter: transportation for the Administrators who live outside the compound. Outside the compound, Rodney thinks a little jealously, with husbands and wives and families, and all their memories intact.

There are two strange vehicles parked in the lot as well: short and squat and oblong, of a design Rodney's never seen before. His stomach flutters—nerves, he thinks—and he follows the Administrative Aide quietly up the stairs, biting his cheek to stay quiet.

As they reach the second floor, there's a blur of movement and then John's there in front of him, looking harassed and wild-eyed. "Rodney! Jesus, I thought—they wouldn't tell me anything. I thought you were dead or something."

Rodney sags a little with relief. "Me too. I mean, I thought _you_ were dead. Or something." Or Treated, he doesn't say. Tortured and memory stripped away again, downranked and sent to the pits ... it's such a relief to see John standing there, whole and healthy and in full possession of his memories (such as they are), that Rodney almost reaches out and hugs him. But John's funny about physical contact outside of the bedroom, and they are in public. The master/servant relationship is understood to be often intimate, but only in private.

"There are people here," John says. His voice is low, barely audible. "In uniforms, with weapons. They keep staring at me."

Rodney sees them over John's shoulder. They are staring in his direction; when they see him looking, they look away unsubtly. The uniforms are dark, somber, and ominous; the weapons are rifles of a sort, sleek and lethal, very different from the small, innocuous-looking subduers the security officers here use. "Soldiers," Rodney says.

"Fuck," John says, incomprehensibly.

"What?"

John blinks. "What?"

"You," Rodney says. "You said 'fuck'. You say that sometimes. What is it?"

"I don't know." John glances over at the looming soldiers. His jaw clenches. "What if they're—I don't even know what I _did_ , Rodney. The Aide wouldn't tell me. It could have been—they're here for us. We must have done something."

"Maybe they're here for me," Rodney says. "It might have been me. You might not have had anything to do with it."

"If it had been you, they wouldn't have called me here," John says. "They might have called you here for me, but they'd never call me here for you."

This is almost certainly true. If John has done something bad, Rodney as his direct supervisor bears responsibility, but that relationship doesn't work both ways. This is only minimally comforting, particularly in the light of the strange, oblique glances they are both receiving from the soldiers at the other end of the hall.

"Maybe," John says, his voice a low and urgent whisper, "they know we're remembering things."

A coil of nausea slowly starts unfurling in Rodney's belly. "That's impossible," he whispers back. "I've never said anything to anyone." Except he's told everyone about John's pizza and ice cream; he's lectured his coworkers about Planck's constant and the theory of relativity. "Have you?"

"I don't know." John's gaze flicks to the soldiers and back again. "I might have."

"You said you only do it around me," Rodney hisses. "With the ... the weird expletives and the song lyrics and the strange alphabet!"

"I've never written in front of anyone else," John whispers fiercely. "But the rest ... Jesus, Rodney, I don't even know when I'm doing it. You're the only one who ever calls me on it."

"You just did it again. The Jesus thing. You have to stop doing that."

"I'm not doing it on purpose! It just happens!"

They glare at each other for a second, and then John glances over at the soldiers again. "They're still staring. Did you see those weapons?"

"No, I missed the huge rifles they're wearing around their necks because of my previously undiagnosed severe vision impairment."

"Maybe they're afraid we're going to remember what we did. Maybe that's why the soldiers are here. They think we're some kind of threat."

"I'm not a threat to anyone, except maybe Vanka, but seriously, he is too stupid to live and should never have been allowed anywhere _near_ the lab."

"Rodney!" John hisses.

"What? I'm nervous! When I'm nervous, I babble. I can't help it. And don't pretend this is news to you."

John's eyes flick to the soldiers again, assessing them, Rodney thinks: the way they stand, the way they hold their weapons. "If they think we're a threat," he whispers finally, "they might Treat us again."

At that, the nausea that's been leisurely unfolding in Rodney's stomach turns into full-blown gastronomic distress. "No," Rodney whispers back fiercely. "No. They can't." _He_ can't. Can't lose everything again, not now when he's just started to claw back bits and pieces of what was taken away, starting to build some sort of life that has purpose and meaning. "We won't let them."

"Let them? We have implants, Rodney. How in the hell can we stop them?"

"I don't know! But Raku's never been irrational. He's always ... he was very reasonable about the Elsha thing. If we just talk to him ..."

"Raku," John says with a frown, "never believes a thing you say until he gets it out of you with truth serum. Don't let the smiles and handshakes fool you. We're just inmates to him."

The door closest to them opens, and the Administrative Aide steps out, wearing a wan, polite smile. "The Administrator will see you now."

John steps forward in front of Rodney. "Stay behind me," he says, low and under his breath.

"What are you going to do, throw yourself on a grenade for me? We're in the Administrative Tower, John, not a war zone."

"Behind me," John repeats flatly.

"I think you're forgetting who's the servant in this relationship," Rodney whispers back sourly, but John's tone brooks no disagreement, and he is already moving in front of Rodney towards the open door.

The soldiers are staring openly now, talking among themselves, and Rodney wonders bleakly, and not for the first time, what the hell is going on.

~~

The first person Rodney sees inside the office is Raku, hovering nervously by the door. He looks tall and austere in his official Administrator robes, but his face is drawn and tense. Behind him there are other Administrators— _five_ , Rodney counts, in a blind panic; he didn't know there were that many in the whole compound—and two of the foreign soldiers over by the window, the black of their uniforms stark against the white silk of the Administrators' robes.

"Are we in trouble?" he blurts out from his position behind John's shoulder. John in front of him is tense and wary, his right hand clenched and twitching strangely down by his thigh. He has not moved more than a step into the room, like he is ...

_... protecting you, Rodney; yes, I damn well am; it's my goddamn job, so stay the fuck behind me! ..._

Rodney starts, but John hasn't moved, and no one else is reacting. _Because it wasn't real_ , Rodney thinks. _Because he didn't say anything. Not here and now._ But in the there and then, somewhere else, somewhen else, John had said those words; they're etched into the architecture of Rodney's brain, but what good does that do him to remember them now, except to prove what he's already figured out on his own? That John's been there for him before ...

_... don't worry; I've got your six ..._

Whatever that means.

"No," Raku says, in answer to Rodney's question. Rodney blinks, because it seems like hours have passed already. "No, of course you're not in trouble."

"You hauled us down here without telling us why," John says, brutally, glacially cold. He has not moved a muscle since they walked into the room, and his body is a solid mass in front of Rodney: a defensive wall. "What did you expect us to think?"

"I'm sorry," Raku says. He looks wretchedly unhappy. He is even wringing his hands. Rodney doesn't think he's ever seen anyone actually do that before. Probably not even in his previous life. The other Administrators are milling about, and none of them will look Rodney in the eye. "I didn't mean for you to think there was anything wrong ... I just didn't want to give the Aides any details that could be taken out of context."

"Details about what?" Rodney asks. "Why are we here?"

His voice a little strangled, Raku answers, "There are people here to see you."

"The soldiers," Rodney whispers into John's ear. John tenses even further, his right hand twitching again. _Reaching for a weapon,_ Rodney thinks. Knows. _His body remembers, even if his mind doesn't_.

The Administrators part, silently and a little awkwardly, dancing around each other to get out of the way, and the soldiers from the back of the room come forward: two women, one tall and fair, the other small and lithe and dark. They're both smiling nervously as they step forward.

John has gone stock-still, utterly rigid. He croaks out a nonsense word, "Teyla?"

The smaller woman breaks out in a wide, relieved grin. "John," she says. She smiles at her companion, then turns back, beaming, to John. "They said you would not remember."

"I don't," John says. He's trembling. "I dreamt you. But I never thought you were _real_." With a step forward, he's in arm's length of her, and he reaches out with a shaking hand to touch her shoulder. "Are you?"

She laughs, a gentle cascade of sound. "Very much so." She places her fingers over his, and squeezes lightly, then lets her warm gaze come to settle on Rodney, gifting him with a similarly friendly smile, filled with affection. "We have searched for you both for quite some time."

"Are you his wife?" Rodney blurts out. He can't help it.

The woman—Teyla?—laughs again, and her taller companion smothers a grin. "No, Rodney. We are teammates, that is all. You and I and John and Ronon."

"Ronon," John repeats, obviously testing the sound and shape of the word out. He looks at the other woman speculatively. "Is that you?"

"God, no," the woman says, obviously taken aback. Then she plasters a smile on her face and says, "I'm Colonel Samantha Carter. Your boss."

"I don't remember you," John says. He glances at Rodney, who shakes his head. "We don't remember you."

"That's all right," Teyla says gently. "We remember you."

"Administrator Raku," the woman called Colonel Samantha Carter says—what a lot of names, Rodney thinks, and shoots John a look, because it's weird the way she said Raku's job, like it's part of his name, part of who he is instead of just what he does—"are you certain there's no way to reverse the effects of this treatment?"

"Treatment," Rodney corrects.

Colonel Samantha Carter—which is way, way too unwieldy; Rodney wonders if she has a nickname or something—smiles at him and says, "That's what I said."

"No," Rodney says. "You said treatment. That's not—that could be anything. Getting a bunion cut out, or a pimple removed. This is Treatment." He says it with the proper inflection. Colonel Samantha Carter looks interested, but still uncomprehending.

"She doesn't get it, Rodney," John says slowly. He's biting his lip the way he does when he's thinking, analyzing all the information he's got, synthesizing an answer. "She can't hear it because this isn't their language. They speak the other one that we can't really remember. Do you know what pizza is?"

Colonel—Rodney can't keep thinking of her as Colonel Samantha Carter; it's too unwieldy—looks startled, and a little amused. "Yes, of course. Bread, tomato sauce and cheese."

"Tomato sauce," John repeats. "It's red?"

"Yes," Colonel says bemusedly. "Tomato sauce is red."

Raku turns to the other Administrators. His face is flushed, maybe in anger. Maybe it's just general agitation. "Do you see?" he demands. "Do you understand now? Five Treatments, and still he remembers."

"That does not excuse it, Raku," one of the others says. She is tall and solid. Her face is hard. "You have greatly exceeded your authority."

"And what would you have had me do?" he says back hotly. It is agitation after all that's on his face, but he's defensive, too. "Ignore the signal, let them go on their way?"

"It is," another Administrator says coolly, "the proper procedure."

"And in another few weeks, maybe another season, John would do something else and require another Treatment. You know this as well as I do."

"Even so." The other Administrator is unconcerned.

"Each time, his abilities degrade." Raku is furious. Rodney's never seen him so emotional about anything. "And yet you would just keep Treating him over and over, though it does no good? How long until he is no longer able to function?"

"There is no evidence-" a fourth Administrator begins, but Raku interrupts him with an unfamiliar word Rodney suspects is an expletive.

"You've seen the scans, Dozhen. Do me the courtesy of not pretending you cannot interpret them."

"I'm sorry," Rodney says cautiously, "but there is obviously some very important information you're all aware of that John and I don't know. What did Raku do? What exactly is going on?"

Teyla turns with an apologetic smile. "Administrator Raku," she says politely, "was kind enough to contact our ship as we flew over this location, after he recognized that the ship's design was similar to the one you crashed. Had he not done so, we would have left again, still unaware you were here."

"Your cloak is quite impressive," Colonel adds. She is obviously trying to appease the other Administrators, who continue to look annoyed. "We had no idea the planet was inhabited."

Rodney starts, and he sees John jump a bit, too. "Planet?" Rodney says faintly. "You came here from another _planet_?"

"Are we aliens?" John is—well, Rodney's not quite sure what John is. Eager? Apprehensive? Intrigued?

"Is that why Treatment doesn't work on us?" Rodney asks.

Raku looks at him, askance, and Rodney flushes. "I remember some things," he mumbles. "Not as many as John."

The silence is long and frosty. "If by aliens," the tall, dour administrator says, "you mean that you are not of this world, then that is correct."

"That's what alien means, doesn't it?" Rodney shoots back. Next to him, John's staring at his skin like he's never seen it before, like he expects it to peel back and reveal scales or feathers.

"You are quite human, Rodney," Teyla replies. "As are you, John. There are humans on many different worlds in this galaxy."

"Many different worlds," Rodney says faintly. "When you said we were from very far away, Raku, I thought you meant another country."

The dour Administrator turns to Raku again, face even colder. "It appears you have been exceeding your authority in many areas, Raku."

"Perhaps." Raku's voice is strained, his fists clenched. "Perhaps I have. But I have had cause. You have not been here, Liria, and you do not know. They would not eat. They did not sleep. Rodney is far too bright to be satisfied with pat answers and half-truths. Perhaps if you read any of my reports, you might have offered your advice before the situation became so dire."

"I think it's crucial to remember here that John and Rodney did not intentionally taint your water supply," Colonel points out. Her voice is pleasant but underneath her tone is hard and unyielding. "Whether or not Raku overstepped his bounds in contacting us, the fact remains that our people have been wrongly convicted and held prisoner here for months. We have returned to this planet half a dozen times since their jumper disappeared. Surely you realized we were searching for them."

"Your search was of no concern," Liria says, "so long as you did not detect our cloak. John and Rodney were given fair trial and justly convicted in accordance with our laws. Had they been found innocent, they would have been released."

"After you erased our memories," Rodney interjects. "Right? I mean, you'd hardly have let us leave your secret city with our memories intact, no matter what the outcome of a trial."

"We would only have taken as far back as was necessary to preserve our secret," Liria says. "You are not the first offworlders we have dealt with."

"You'd have treated them," Colonel says, missing the inflection again. Maybe John is right. Maybe she can't hear it. "Which brings me back to my original question: can the process be reversed?"

All the Administrators look at each. Liria is the one who answers, "Not to our knowledge."

"Understand," Raku says—is it Rodney's imagination that he sounds regretful?—"this is not our technology. It was bequeathed to us centuries ago by those who inhabited this world before us. Our engineers have been successful in replicating it, but ..."

"You don't actually understand how it works," Rodney finishes. "That's just great. You scrambled our brains with machines you _copied_. We're lucky we didn't end up babbling idiots."

"Speak for yourself," John says tightly. "Your abilities aren't degrading with each Treatment."

"A few short-term memory lapses don't make you a babbling idiot," Rodney points out sensibly. "It makes you forgetful."

" _Forgetful_? Rodney-"

Colonel interrupts with a slight cough. "We'd be very interested in seeing the machines you used to perform this treatment. Or better yet, the prototypes, if they're available."

One of the Administrators who has been silent to this point speaks up. "They have not worked in many decades."

"We'd still like to see them. We have extensive experience with technologies from all over the galaxy. It's possible we'll recognize it. We might be able to engineer a cure. That would be beneficial to you as well."

There is a lot of angry conversation, to which Rodney listens with only half an ear. The other half of his attention is focused on John. It should be expected, he thinks; after all, for seasons, John's been the focus of his attention. He tries to imagine what it would be like to regain his memory, worries that he will find out that he and John were never more than colleagues. He wonders whether that will change how he feels about John now. He thinks not. It seems doubtful there's any memory that could be strong enough, visceral enough, to override his more recent experiences, his strongest emotions.

But that's not to say it will be the same for John. For all the time they've spent together, John is still hard to read, hard to figure. His temperament is uneven, his response to situations dependent on the day of the week and the weather. Rodney still has no idea whether that's something inherent to his personality, or whether it's the successive Treatments that have made him this way. And if so, whether regaining his memory will erase that, or whether all he'll get back are the cold hard facts of his existence.

"Do not worry," Teyla is saying to John, patting him on the arm, which she shouldn't be doing, Rodney thinks, because John doesn't like to be touched in public, and in fact John is making the face he makes when he's trying not to show how uncomfortable he is. "Colonel Carter is extremely intelligent." (So it's "Colonel Carter", Rodney thinks, which is at least a bit shorter, though still unwieldy). "The scientists in our city are equally bright. I have every confidence that they will discover how to return your memories to you. But if they do not," and here she pats John on the arm again, "we will tell you all that we know so that you may regain yourself that way."

"What did I do?" John asks. "Before? I cook, here, and clean, and work in the fields. Is that the kind of stuff I did before?"

Teyla looks bemused. "I have never seen you cook when you didn't have to, nor clean, although your quarters were always tidy. We have no fields in which to work. You were leader of the military forces in our city, John."

John draws in a deep breath, and the look he shoots as Rodney is indecipherable. Or it would be, if Rodney didn't know how much John disliked almost everything he was assigned to do. John's relieved, but he's trying to hide it, because he doesn't want Rodney to know just how relieved he is.

"What about Rodney? What did he do?"

"He was the Chief Science Officer. It was in that capacity, and yours as the military leader, John, that the two of you came to this planet. Ordinarily Ronon and I would have accompanied you, but our presence was needed elsewhere and the mission was supposed to be, as you put it, a 'cake-walk'."

"John makes delicious cake," Rodney blurts out, then feels himself flush. "What?" he says defensively to John's outraged glare. "You do!"

"I think it's safe to say," John says levelly, "that I'm not making you any more cake."

Teyla continues to look amused, and she reaches out to touch them both. "I have missed you both very, very much. I think perhaps I did not realize how much until this moment."

"Colonel Sheppard." This is from Colonel Carter, who is looking at John expectantly. "Colonel Sheppard."

Rodney pokes John. "I think she's talking to you."

"Huh?" John says, at the same time as Raku is telling Colonel Carter, "They go by only one name here."

"Oh," Colonel Carter says with a small frown. "John."

"Is that my name?" John asks. "Colonel Sheppard?"

"I thought Colonel was a name for females," Rodney adds. "Do you use the same names for men and women? That must be confusing."

"Your name is John Sheppard," Colonel Carter explains with a small smile and an inexplicable eye-roll. "Your military rank is Colonel. We address you with it to show respect."

"You call me by my job title?" John says blankly. His gaze sidles over to Rodney and then back again. "Can we go home now?"

"John," Teyla begins hesitantly, "perhaps we should consider-" but John cuts her off.

"I don't care," he says. "Whatever it is you're going to say, I don't care. I don't like it here, and I want to leave. Wherever you take us has got to be better than here."

The Administrators are all visibly taken aback; Liria offended; Raku distressed. "John," Raku says, "I understand that your time here has been difficult, but surely-"

"My time here has been difficult?" John's eyebrows have possibly never been this high. "I don't even know how long I've been here. Every time I do something you don't like, you erase my memory again. In a process which, incidentally, is some kind of torture. If you think the fact that I don't actually remember it makes it better, you're wrong."

"It's not torture," Dozhen—the one who's seen the scans, whatever scans they are—says. "It's not torture. You don't-"

"Have you ever been Treated?" John shoots back. "Been strapped down to a table and had your neural connections ripped to shreds?"

"Of course I haven't been Treated," Dozhen says stiffly. "That doesn't mean I'm unaware of the process."

"Unaware of the process." John is even angrier now, vibrating with it, and the last time Rodney saw him this furious was about a minute before the fight with the security officer. "Rodney tells me when I got hit with the subduers, I went into convulsions."

"He did," Rodney says helpfully. "His whole body went into spasm. He was bleeding from his nose and ears and he was screaming and watching it happen was the worst experience of my life. That I can recall. I don't think calling it torture is that much of a stretch, really."

When she speaks, Colonel Carter's voice is much, much colder than it was only moments ago. "We'd really like to see those prototypes, if you don't mind. In the meantime, maybe John and Rodney would like to gather their things."

"What things?" Rodney asks. "There's nothing here I'd want to take with me." Except for John, really, but he's coming anyway. There's nothing else in the compound—on the planet, god—that Rodney cares enough about to take anywhere.

"I want my journal," John says.

It's funny, but now that John's voiced the want to go home, now that this Colonel Carter—Carter, Rodney thinks; Colonel is a title, so, presumably, Carter is her name, though whether he should address her as Carter or Samantha is another question—has suggested they gather their things, suddenly all Rodney wants to do is leave. Leave this building, leave this compound, leave, god, the _planet_ , the faster the better.

"Let them get it for you," Rodney says, speaking fast. "Let's just leave right now. Let them get our stuff for us and we can sort it out when we get—" _home_ feels too strange, too intimate, for a place Rodney has no recollection of, not even an imagining of—"back. To wherever. Let's just go."

"I want my journal," John repeats, arms crossed stubbornly on his chest. His glare at Rodney is half accusatory, half tentative, seeking permission: John's still getting accustomed to the idea that he is not Rodney's servant any more, after filling that role for literally as long as he can remember. Rodney's no better off: he's never known John in any other capacity. That John's a kind of bossy, obstinate servant doesn't really make a difference to the fact that their only interactions have been under these artificial circumstances. Rodney doesn't know how to relate to John as an equal; that's not because he wouldn't, but because John would never let him. "I don't want them to read it. I don't want them to touch it."

Rodney doesn't point out that there's probably no one else on the planet who can read John's journal except for John. When John gets stubborn like this there is no arguing with him—or there is, but only by playing the "master" card, which causes John to cave immediately, though the resulting sulk is hardly ever worth it—and Rodney can't really blame him, because if Rodney had anything as personal as John's journal is, it's possible he wouldn't want anyone touching it either, even if they couldn't read it.

"All right," Rodney says, "let's go get our things." He's careful not to make it sound like he's granting permission, just that he's agreeing to a logical suggestion. He doesn't know these other people—this Colonel Carter, or Teyla—he doesn't know how they think, can't predict how they'll react when they learn, if they haven't already, that John's job here was mainly to serve Rodney. But Rodney can remember his own instinctive reaction to learning he was having a servant, the assumptions he'd made about John without ever having met him, just because he'd been in the mines, just because he'd been expected to cook and clean for Rodney.

If John's really the military leader of these people, then it's probably best that it doesn't appear that he's looking to Rodney for approval for every decision, even if, in John's case, he takes everything other than flat-out _disapproval_ as tacit consent. The point is that he shouldn't be asking for Rodney's approval at all, no matter what form it comes in.

"Take Major Lorne with you," Colonel Carter says to Teyla. "I'll just wait here with Administrator Raku while we see if the prototypes are available." Her tone of voice is not at all friendly, even though she's smiling.

Teyla gives a nod that is not subservient at all, so maybe, Rodney thinks, Colonel Carter is not her boss. He wonders what their relationship to each other is and wishes he knew more about these people who know so much about him.

This Major Lorne person is waiting outside, and keeps looking at John peculiarly. "It's good to see you again, sir," he says, when Teyla leads him over from where he has been hovering with the rest of the off-world soldiers.

John flinches, then nods awkwardly and takes a quick step ahead to join Rodney as they walk towards the exit. "Am I really in charge of those people?" he whispers, indicating with the slightest jerk of his head the remaining soldiers still milling about the hall.

"It looks that way," Rodney says.

"That's really ... weird," John says. He sounds very uncertain, and Rodney can see by the strain in his neck that he's forcibly stopping himself from turning around to look at them. "How many of them do you think there are?"

"Well," Rodney whispers back, "there's at least five more here." It doesn't sound like much, except that they are walking around with very nasty looking weapons. Subduers can be lethal, but only by sustained application; by design, they are meant to punish, not wound or kill. These weapons the soldiers carry are meant to kill, to maim; Rodney imagines the six soldiers here tearing a bloody swath through the compound, shooting the subduers out of the security officers' hands, offering violent resistance to a group of people who haven't been trained to expect it. The image is so clear in his head, rifles pumping out bullets, flesh ripping and blood splattering, that Rodney knows he's seen it before.

"There's more than six," John hisses back.

"Obviously. Nobody would bring their entire army on a rescue mission. Not that you could even call six people an army. More like a strike team. Would a strike team have a military leader?"

" _Rodney_."

They walk down the stairs in silence, Teyla and Major Lorne following a few paces behind.

"If you don't want to talk about my job," John says finally, still whispering, still irritable, "we can talk about yours. Teyla said you're the chief science officer. How many people do you think _you're_ in charge of?"

He means it to be hypothetical and a little nasty, but Rodney answers, "Fifty," immediately.

Now John just looks disgusted. "How can you possibly know that?"

"Obviously I don't. I'm guessing. I just don't think they'd have a chief science officer if there were less than fifty scientists. Otherwise, why bother? If it makes you feel any better, I figure you're in charge of a couple of hundred people."

"A couple of hundred," John repeats faintly.

"At least. Could be more."

"Okay, that's not—you're just ..." John ducks his head and drops his voice to an even softer whisper. "Rodney, I've never been in charge of _anything_."

"Obviously you have been. You just don't remember."

"No, I don't! That's kind of a problem." John's chewing at his lip in a rare display of nerves. "It doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd be good at."

"Now that," Rodney says, "is just ridiculous. You are bossy and you like to hit things. I don't know what other qualities you could possibly want in a military leader, except perhaps intelligence enough not to start random wars, and you're certainly smart enough for that."

"Gee, that may be the most flattering thing anyone's ever said about me."

"That's only because your memory doesn't extend back beyond the last month."

"I knew we'd laugh about it some day," John says dryly. "But seriously. Rodney. What if I'm terrible at it?"

"Please," Rodney says. "What experience have you had since you've been here that has given you any indication whatsoever of how good you'd be at this job?"

"Nothing. But-"

"No buts. You have been cooking and cleaning and mining and farming, and while all of these things are very valuable contributions to society, I don't see how you can use them as the basis to form an opinion of your ability to command an army."

"It's just a feeling," John says grumpily.

"Feelings are unreliable indicators of reality. You don't see me getting stressed about the prospect of supervising fifty scientists, do you?"

"You work in a _lab_ ," John says.

"As a glorified technician," Rodney scoffs. "Running experiments. In a capacity so far below my intellectual capabilities, it's laughable. It's not practical experience for leading a science department, but I'm nonetheless confident I can do just that."

"That's because you're smarter than everyone else around you."

"You," Rodney declares, "are being ridiculous." He turns around and snaps his fingers at the soldier, Major Lorne. "Hey. Is John a good commander?"

Major Lorne looks a bit startled. "Um."

"See," John says, with a pointed glare at Rodney.

"Um is not an assessment of your skills. Is it?" Rodney's glare at Major Lorne is just as pointed as John's. Lorne, flatteringly, now looks a little nervous.

"No," Lorne says. "I mean, no, it's not an assessment. You're a very good commander, sir. A bit unconventional for some, but I've always considered that an asset."

"As have I," Teyla says, stepping forward. "Do not concern yourself, John. You are very well regarded among the expedition's military personnel. You have been much missed."

"You too, Dr. McKay," Major Lorne says. "Or so I hear."

It takes Rodney a minute to realize he's the one being addressed (only after John nudges him). "Am I a doctor?" Rodney is a little disappointed, and a little surprised.

"Not a medical doctor," Teyla answers with a small, mysterious grin. "An academic doctor."

For some reason, this is a significant relief.

~~

The quickest way from the Administrative Tower to Rodney's apartment is to take public transport back to the central hub, and then from there to switch to the blue line, which has a stop that's only a short walk to Rodney's apartment building.

John leads them right past the entrance to the transport system, and onto the pedestrian concourse. Walking, it will take them nearly thirty minutes to reach home. For someone who was so eager to get off the planet, John now seems strangely reluctant to leave. "Taking the scenic route?" Rodney murmurs, too low for Teyla and Major Lorne to hear.

"Something like that," John says with a shrug. He kicks at a few leaves on the ground.

"You're just afraid to go back and face everyone."

"I don't even know who everyone is." But John doesn't otherwise contest the charge, and that's strange, because Rodney is not used to seeing John diffident about anything, at least not about anything that's to do with his own abilities. John's actually kind of arrogant, in a sneaky, quiet way that's a lot more subtle than Rodney ever is— John accuses him of having a bad case of "in-your-face egotism." John thinks he is better than almost everybody else at almost everything; the fact that he will never say it out loud doesn't mean he's not convinced that it's true. It's why he is always so reluctant to accept help, why he has let Rodney strip the sheets (once or twice) but would never even think of letting Rodney make the bed.

"Well," Rodney says, in what he thinks is a comforting manner, "we've been gone for seasons, and you don't remember anything of any real importance. They probably won't put you back in charge anyway."

John stares at him incredulously. "Please tell me you're not trying to make me feel better."

"Of course I'm trying to make you feel better."

"You're doing a lousy job of it," John says, and that is just petty, because Rodney has never claimed to be good with people.

"At least I can recognize that you are upset," Rodney huffs, "and in need of comforting."

"I'm not upset. I'm processing. It's a lot to take in."

"People don't process. Computers process. People overthink things in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to subvert their initial, primal emotional responses to stressful situations. And don't tell me you aren't upset, because if we'd just gotten on the transport we would already have been home."

"If we'd gotten on the public transport, there would have been a riot as soon as someone spotted the huge automatic weapons Teyla and Major Lorne are carrying." John delivers this with his most evil look, the one Rodney has privately dubbed John's "I don't care how smart you are; sometimes you're just _dumb_ ," look.

Rodney bristles, but, unfortunately, doesn't have an immediate response, which means that John follows up his evil look with a smugly victorious smirk.

~~

By the time they get back to the apartment, Rodney has learned a few things about himself:

1\. His full name is Meredith Rodney McKay. People generally call him Rodney, or McKay, or Dr. McKay, but never Meredith. Except for his sister, who is item 2.

2\. He has a younger sister, whose name is Jeannie Miller. She is married to a Vegetarian (whatever that is) named Kaleb and has a daughter named Madison, which means Rodney is an uncle. Rodney has no other immediate family.

3\. Rodney is not married. He has never been married. His most recent relationship was with a botanist named Katie Brown—a _botanist_? he'd asked in horrified disbelief—but their relationship ended several months before his disappearance, and as far as Teyla and Major Lorne know, he had not been dating anyone else since. ("A botanist," John had said with a smirk, and it had taken most of Rodney's self-control not to smack him in the head.)

4\. He and John are from another galaxy. Another _galaxy_. "But how," Rodney had spluttered, "how is that ... I mean, how can-" after which John had smirked and whispered, "Processing," and this time Rodney had given in and smacked John in the head because a man can only take so much.

Rodney has also learned a few things about John:

1\. Before John was a military commander, he was a pilot. "Damn fine pilot, sir," Lorne had said sincerely. "One of the best I've ever seen." And Rodney was thinking _yes, yes, of course_ while John had been helplessly, transparently relieved.

2\. John had been married once, a long time ago. The marriage had been brief and John never talks about it.

3\. Neither Teyla nor Major Lorne are certain if John has any siblings, or if his parents are alive. Rodney can not quite understand this. "That's ... that's weird, right? I mean, obviously nobody talked about their family here, but wouldn't you know something like that about someone you worked with for years?" Major Lorne had just shrugged, and Teyla had said gently to John, "You have always been a very private person." John seems very unconcerned.

4\. John has dated exactly no one in the city since Teyla and Lorne have known him. "There was one woman from a nearby planet a few years ago," Teyla says, with something very weird in her voice. Rodney is immediately curious. "Her name was Chaya, and you were very much taken with her, but you were ... from very different backgrounds. It did not work out." "Okay," John says, but then he adds, "No one since then? Jeez." And then he glances at Rodney, but looks away again without saying anything.

When they arrive at the apartment, Rodney has a brief moment of thinking, "I am never coming back here again," that is both scary and exhilarating. But when he opens the door and steps inside, John says, oddly, "Smells like the stew's ready," and then suddenly Rodney is showing Major Lorne and Teyla around the apartment while John is setting the small table for four. It is strangely mundane, and it is hard to believe that in a few hours he will be off this planet and headed to wherever it is he used to call home.

The apartment, of course, is spotless, and it is not very big, so it takes very little time to show all of it to Teyla and Lorne. Rodney, once inside the bedroom, realizes that perhaps there are a few things he would like to take back with him after all: a sweater he has come to like particularly, some half-sketched notes on a propulsion system, the crumpled up piece of parchment on which John wrote "R-O-D-N-E-Y" in a foreign alphabet.

Over by the door to the bedroom, Teyla and Major Lorne are speaking in low, urgent whispers. "What?" Rodney asks, looking up and around. There is nothing of particular interest in the room, and it is as spotless as the rest of the apartment. "Is there a problem?"

"No," Teyla says, while at the same time Lorne says, "Yes."

"Well, which is it?" Rodney asks, while Teyla shoots an annoyed glare at Major Lorne.

Lorne shrugs. "They're going to have to know. Better they hear it from us."

"Hear what from you?" Rodney stares at Lorne with narrowed eyes. "What do we need to know?"

Teyla looks exasperated, or possibly just irritated. "Major Lorne noticed that there appears to be only one bed, and he is concerned that the two of you might-"

"I'm not concerned," Lorne breaks in. "It's none of my business. It's just that people will talk if they find out and-"

"What Major Lorne means," Teyla says frostily, "is that intimate relationships between members of the same sex are frowned upon in his military."

"They're more than frowned upon," Lorne says defensively. "Teyla, you've been around us long enough to realize-"

"It will not go well for John if people learned you and he shared a bed for this length of time," Teyla says. She appears to be ignoring Lorne. "Even if your relationship was entirely platonic and chaste."

Rodney is about to protest, because John was his servant and so it can hardly be held against him that he slept in the same bed as Rodney (Rodney is not sure if his relationship with John was ever platonic, but it was certainly not chaste; even so, John was his servant and that's how things are done here, so how can John be held to blame?), but then Rodney remembers the last time he'd had sex with John, John scrabbling at the wall with desperate, uncoordinated fingers, panting and cursing under his breath as Rodney had taken him from behind; pushy and demanding, there had been nothing of the servant in John then. Servants have to accede to all reasonable demands, but that doesn't mean they have to like it. So all Rodney says is, "Then we won't tell people. We don't want them to get the wrong idea," and he tries not to be offended when Major Lorne looks vastly relieved.

~~

Dinner is very strange. First of all, Rodney has never had guests in the apartment for any length of time before, certainly not for a meal. It feels crowded and claustrophobic with four people perched around the small table. And then there is the way Teyla and Major Lorne have of casually dropping startling pieces of information into the conversation like they are nothing startling at all. At first Rodney thought they didn't realize they were doing it; now he thinks they're having a little bit of fun at his and John's expense.

"Wait a minute," John says, staring at Teyla, who is looking back with amused interest. "You're not from the same planet we are?"

"No. I am a native of this galaxy."

John shakes his head. "It's going to take a little while to get used to all of this." He stands up and heads back into the kitchen, reemerging a minute later with the stew. "There's no point leaving leftovers. Anyone want seconds?"

Teyla demurs politely, but Lorne is enthusiastic about having more. "Feels like I'm back in my grandma's kitchen on Sunday afternoon." He takes a bite, and gestures appreciatively with his fork. "I had no idea you could cook, sir. If they don't clear you for active duty right away, you could take a turn in the canteen."

John freezes for a minute, then grins a small, brittle grin and says, "Yeah, I guess I could," even though every cell in his body is screaming, _absolutely not_. And Rodney doesn't say anything, because of Lorne's vast relief, earlier, the way he'd said, "It's none of my business," and Teyla's uncomfortable, "It may not go well for John." Realization is a cold, hard lump sitting sickly in his stomach, that there's more to worry about than he'd guessed, that it's not just the fact that John was his servant that they'll have to hide, but every facet of their lives together. And he hasn't had a chance to tell John this; it's only sheer, dumb luck, he thinks, that John hasn't accidentally confirmed what Lorne so desperately doesn't want to know. Dumb luck and the fact that John's so compulsively _proper_ that he'd never touch Rodney inappropriately in public anyway. In light of that, Teyla's, "You have always been a very private person," rings even more true. So that, at least, is one thing about John that Treatment hasn't altered.

"I noticed," Teyla says lightly, "that you have a set of sticks here, John."

"He carved them himself," Rodney finds himself saying. "Polished them with leftover cooking oil. Took him weeks. He didn't even know what he was making until he was finished with them."

"You never told me that," John says, frowning.

"You never asked. There's probably a lot I didn't tell you." He hadn't, because John hadn't seemed all that interested, and Rodney had been able to understand it. What was the point in learning about a past that could be ripped away again at any time? Better to focus on the present.

"I dreamt about them," John says. "And you, Teyla. In my dreams, you went together with the sticks."

"We used to spar," Teyla answers. She seems pleased. "Especially in our early days in the city, when things were so uncertain. It was a distraction. Of late you sparred more often with Ronon."

Ronon is the absent fourth member of their team. So far, Rodney has gathered that he has been a soldier for most of his life; he is huge, extremely capable with weapons and is very skilled in hand-to-hand combat. He is not here because he is back on Atlantis (which is either the name of their planet or possibly the name of the city in which they live) supervising "Pegasus Galaxy Boot Camp" for a group of newly arrived soldiers. "He will be very pleased to see you returned," Teyla had said earlier. "And though he will be upset to have missed this, it is perhaps better that he is not here." At this, she had exchanged significant glances with Lorne, without further comment.

"Sparring with Ronon," Lorne pipes up, "was just a display of masochism, if you ask me. I mean, Teyla used to kick your ass, sir, but she never put you in the infirmary."

Teyla frowns at Lorne. "You should not say such things. You will give them both a distorted picture of themselves. You are not a masochist, John."

Rodney wants to snort and say, "Like hell he isn't," because he remembers all the angry, violent sex, John punishing himself for something he couldn't even remember; Rodney remembers the way John pushed himself past all reasonable limits, days he came home from the mines or the fields so exhausted he was shaking with it, aching from a hundred self-inflicted bruises from overwork. At home, Rodney remembers John scrubbing toilets and showers until they gleamed, even though it made him miserable, even though Rodney hardly cared about those sorts of things. But these are more things Rodney doesn't think he should say out loud, not until he learns more about these people and the boundaries of what is and isn't permitted.

"That's good to know," John says evenly, but his eyes are shadowed, and Rodney wonders if he is remembering the same things as Rodney.

John scrapes out the bottom of the dish of stew, forcing thirds on Rodney and Lorne (who does a poor job of pretending to be reluctant about it), and then excuses himself to gather his things. A few minutes later, Lorne steps out into the hall to contact Colonel Carter—"I'm sure she didn't expect us to be gone this long"—leaving Rodney alone with Teyla, which is unexpectedly awkward, because Teyla remembers him, but he doesn't remember her at all.

"So this is awkward," Rodney says.

Teyla laughs. "You may have lost your memory, Rodney, but you have not otherwise changed very much."

"Oh. That's good, I think. Is it good? Did I need to change?"

"There are those who will say otherwise, but no, Rodney, you did not need to change. I like you as you are."

Rodney looks away toward the bedroom. "And John? Has he changed?"

Teyla shrugs delicately. "He is not so easy to read. In his essence, he still seems himself. With, perhaps, his emotions closer to the surface."

Rodney is flabbergasted. " _Closer_ to the surface? You mean to tell me this is him being emotional?"

"He is upset, and unsettled, and apprehensive, and the fact that I can sense all those things from him is unusual." Teyla is silent for a moment, thoughtful. "He never seeks to hide his anger, or his amusement. But when he is uncertain, he keeps it close." Then she raises an eyebrow at him, speculatively. "His relationship with you seems much as it was."

Rodney fidgets with his napkin. "Does it? I don't remember what we were like before."

"You were friends," Teyla says, and it is impossible to tell if she means more by that than it sounds. "Teammates and colleagues. You spent a lot of time together. You fought often but always made up quickly. You shared a taste for practical jokes and juvenile humor. If there was more to your relationship than it appeared, you did not share that fact with me."

"But we wouldn't have. Right? I mean, it sounds like we wouldn't have been able to."

"You could always have told me," Teyla says gently. "Perhaps I am arrogant in assuming that you would have, had there been any such thing to share. But I am not part of John's military, Rodney, and I would never betray a secret."

The thing is, instinctively, Rodney trusts her, believes that she is telling the truth. But he doesn't know her any more than he knows Major Lorne or Colonel Carter, and he doesn't know himself well enough yet to know whether he can trust his own instincts. So all he says is, "That's good to know," and rises to his feet to start clearing the plates into the kitchen.

John, predictably, appears out of thin air at the sound of ceramic clinking in the sink. "I'll do it," he says with a scowl, and literally pushes Rodney out of the kitchen.

Rodney sighs. "This isn't your job anymore, John."

John's frown is fierce. "It's not yours, either."

"You're right. It's not either of our jobs. Just leave it. We're not coming back here. We don't have to leave the kitchen clean."

For a minute, Rodney thinks John is actually considering it, but neurotic compulsion ultimately wins. "I'll do it," John says. He pushes Rodney farther away. "It'll take ten minutes. Go get the rest of your stuff."

"You're awfully bossy for a servant," Rodney says sourly. "Have I ever told you that?"

"Only a couple dozen times a day."

"Enjoy it while you can," Rodney yells back from the living room where he's been banished. Teyla raises her eyebrow at him again. "In a few hours, your days of servitude are over. No more bossing me around."

"That's what you think," John calls out. "Not only am I the military commander, which totally trumps chief science officer, but Teyla tells me I'm our team leader. So from now on, I'll be bossing you around legitimately."

Rodney stares accusingly at Teyla. "Is that true?"

"He is indeed our team leader," she says helplessly. "Though if it is any consolation, you do not often listen to him."

Major Lorne comes back in at that moment. "Colonel Carter says we can take as long as we need, but that they're ready to leave as soon as we get back."

"Good," Rodney says. "That's really very good."

John comes back out at that moment and gathers up the remaining dirty dishes. "Five minutes," he calls out over his shoulder as he heads back to the kitchen.

Lorne stares at his back for a second. "Shouldn't we offer to help him, or something?"

"Waste of time," Rodney says. He looks around the living room, wondering if there is anything at all in it that he wants (there isn't). "He's a tyrant in there. If you even try to help, he'll just ridicule you and tell you that you're doing everything wrong."

"Huh," Lorne says with an odd sort of look on his face. "I wonder where he got that from."

"I have no idea," Rodney says, "but it's not one of his better traits." He is taken aback when both Lorne and Teyla start to laugh.


	5. Chapter 5

Together, all of John and Rodney's things—packed carefully into separate bags, because they have separate quarters, separate lives—do not take up very much room, and weigh very little. John wants to carry Rodney's bag but on this Rodney takes a firm stance. "You're not my servant anymore," he hisses. "You don't want to show up in front of all those soldiers carrying my things."

"You're just going to complain all the way there about how heavy it is," John says, rolling his eyes. "But fine. Carry your own bag. No skin off my nose."

"What does that mean?" Rodney asks in exasperation. "Honestly, I think you make half of these things up."

"I suppose we'll find out soon enough," John says. He takes one last look around the apartment. Whatever emotion he is feeling, he keeps to himself. "Let's go."

Rodney takes a last look for himself. The apartment looks about the same as always, spotlessly neat, everything in its proper place, but it already feels empty. Rodney wonders how long it will be before someone else moves in, if that someone will appreciate all the work John put into keeping the apartment clean, all the appliances working. He kind of doubts it, and that makes him a little wistful, but he shuts the door behind him anyway because it's no longer something he has to worry about. "Let's go," he says. When they leave the apartment building for the last time, neither John nor Rodney looks back.

John's quiet on the walk back to the Administrative Tower. Pensive, Rodney thinks. He takes them back a slightly different way—why is it, Rodney wonders, that he never noticed John's tendency to lead when they're walking together? Could it just be habit so deeply ingrained neither of them ever noticed it?—and Rodney wonders if it's coincidence that this other route, not any faster or prettier, takes them through the park where John fought with the security officer Elsha. He's never told John where it happened, but John's ability to hack into the compound mainframe, while not on par with Rodney's, is more than good enough to find out this one thing.

If John is taking one last, morbid look at the site of the altercation, he doesn't show it in any obvious way. His footsteps remain steady, his gaze doesn't stray from the path ahead of them.

Teyla and Major Lorne stay quiet too, not asking any stupid questions like, "Is there anything about this place you're going to miss?" or "It's pretty here." The fact that there are one or two things that Rodney will miss, or that it is, in fact, relatively pretty inside the compound, doesn't change the fact that this place is a prison. Rodney thinks that if he's stupid enough to miss anything about it, then that should be his own private shame.

"Are those your spaceships?" John says, as they approach the Tower. With his head he's nodding at the funny little transports parked in the lot.

"Of course not," Rodney answers, before Teyla or Lorne can. "They're half the size of a shuttle bus. They must be ground transport for planetary travel. Although ... oh, look at the pods. Are they hovercraft? That's actually something we were working on a little bit at the lab here, though we still hadn't worked out a way to compensate for sudden shifts in the terrain."

"They can hover," Lorne says with obvious amusement. "They can also fly. And go out of the atmosphere."

"Spaceships," John says, aiming a nasty smirk in Rodney's general direction.

"We call them puddle jumpers," Lorne says. He sounds purposefully innocent, like there's something he's not saying, but when Rodney looks at him, he's ambling along, hands resting loosely on his weapon.

"That's a ridiculous name for a spaceship," Rodney says, just to provoke a reaction, but Lorne just shrugs.

"We've all pretty much accepted it by now, Dr. McKay," and Rodney is so thrown, again, by this unfamiliar name and title being thrust upon him, that he completely forgets about the odd little spaceships. John, though, stares hungrily at them, and whispers to Rodney, "I used to dream about them, too."

John stops at the foot of the stairs and puts his bag down for a second, staring up at the tall, white marble building, wearing an indecipherable expression on his face. He's rubbing at his temple, frowning slightly, and because it's far too soon for Rodney to give up the habit of worrying, Rodney asks, "Are you all right?" He whispers it softly; just because he can't give up being neurotic doesn't mean he needs to advertise it.

"I'm fine," John says, in the way that means he really isn't.

"You've got a headache."

John drops his hand, and turns to scowl at Rodney. "I've got a buzzing in my ears. It's not a headache. And I'm sure it's nothing. Can we go, now?"

"You're the one who stopped," Rodney points out sensibly.

John's scowl deepens, and he lifts up his bag with a jerk, stomping up the stairs.

"As I said," Teyla whispers in Rodney's ear, "his emotions are closer to the surface."

"He has a headache," Rodney whispers back.

"I do _not_ have a headache," John says. He turns around and glares. He's trying to look angry, but there's strain around his eyes which makes Rodney worry more. "I have a buzzing in my ears. And if I had a headache, which I _don't_ , it would no longer be your problem, _McKay_." He turns around and stalks up the rest of the stairs, while Rodney is flinching from the use of this other, foreign name. It feels like a slap in the face, and even the knowledge that John was doing it on purpose, was trying his best to deflect, deflect, deflect, doesn't ease the sting.

Rodney doesn't say anything else until they enter Raku's office, and all he says then is, "We're back." But then he goes very quiet, because there's a screen on one of the walls, and on it is some kind of video feed of himself, and John. John is shackled and struggling and cursing, and Rodney is also shackled, but looking sick and frightened, and, "What the hell?" Rodney wants to say, only to find that John has said it first.

Raku looks up, startled, and reaches for a control panel on his desk, but Colonel Carter stops the motion. "Leave it on," she says, voice cold and brittle. "John. Rodney. Administrator Raku was just showing me some of the video footage from your trial."

It's mesmerizing, in a horrible sort of way. It's ... well, it's him, obviously, but Rodney has no recollection of it, not even the slightest sense of familiarity. There are people in white Administrator robes, but Rodney's never seen them before—at least, he doesn't remember ever seeing them before; obviously he has in reality seen them at least once—and people in yellow medic robes, others in pink robes that serve some function Rodney can't even guess at.

John, the John of now, who's in the room, is staring at the screen, looking deathly pale, eyes big and round and huge in his face. John on the screen is flushed and vibrating with fury, and even though he's shackled, no one can get close to him.

"Take him down," someone yells offscreen, and the hulking security officers in blue move in.

"We're not going to hurt you!" someone else is yelling, a woman in a pink robe. "You don't need to—please, Colonel Sheppard, just calm down. We're not going to hurt you."

The John on the screen is still fighting, but his shouting has gone hoarse and desperate as the security officers force him down to the floor, and the only word that's intelligible is, "Rodney."

"Don't hurt him!" _That's **me**_ , Rodney thinks numbly. _When I still knew who I was._ "Stop it, just stop it. We'll come quietly, I promise, just don't hurt him!"

"No one's going to get hurt," the earnest woman in pink says. Her hands are shaking. "You won't even remember. I promise."

John on the screen yells some more. It is still unintelligible, and ends in a shriek that goes abruptly, hideously silent. The video footage ends then, but not before focusing once more on Rodney's terrified face.

"Okay," Rodney says weakly into the resulting, tense silence. "That was disturbing."

"Disturbing?" John repeats incredulously. "Rodney-"

" _Very_ disturbing. Incredibly disturbing, all right?"

"No," John says hotly. "Not all right. Incredibly far from all right." He rounds on Raku. "Is that what you tell everyone? That you won't hurt them?"

"If administered properly, Treatment does not-" Raku begins, but then he stops and closes his eyes, looking pained. "Most people are sedated. There is minimal discomfort. And no one remembers, regardless. It is not exactly a lie."

"It's not exactly the truth either, is it?" Rodney says, throwing his hands up in the air. "Torture isn't torture if you don't remember it? Is that what you tell yourselves?"

"It is not torture," Raku insists. "And you must remember, Treatment is administered only to convicted criminals whom we have no other method of rehabilitating."

"Just stop," John says, drawing one hand raggedly across his forehead. His eyes are closed. "Just shut up and stop talking. It doesn't matter what you think you're doing, or how you justify it to yourselves. Colonel Carter, can we leave now?"

"He's got a headache," Rodney announces, to no one in particular. "It's getting worse."

"Jesus," John swears, and Rodney has time to think to himself, _I've got to find out what that means_ , and also think, _I wonder if Teyla knows_ , before John grinds out, "I want to _leave_."

"I think that's an excellent idea," Colonel Carter says. She's smiling the tight, cold smile again. "Are you sure there's no way we can take the prototype back with us?"

"Absolutely not," Liria says. Her face is filled with hectic color, spots of red high on her cheeks. "As I said, you are welcome to have your scientists return to study it, if you feel it will be useful."

"It would be more useful to study it in our own laboratories," Colonel Carter answers back. Her voice is tight and frustrated. She turns to Teyla and Major Lorne and says, "It's ancient."

Lorne looks immediately interested. "Have you tried to activate it?"

"Morgan tried." She shakes her head. "Not a glimmer. He thinks the power source is probably drained, or else it's broken."

"As we have said," Raku interjects, "it has not worked in nearly a century. According to our records, even then it was difficult to operate. There were no more than a handful of people who knew how to make it work. Our engineers were only just able to successfully duplicate the functionality before the device ceased working altogether."

"Dr. Zelenka's new device may be able to restore the power cell," Teyla suggests. "If the device is indeed of ancient design."

"I'm sure it is," Colonel Carter answers, sounding tired. "It's characteristic of their technology. Whether or not Radek will be able to recharge it is another manner. Frankly, I'm not sure I want to recharge it. I would just like to figure out what it was meant to do, if we assume it wasn't meant to do this." As she points with her chin to Rodney and John, Rodney feels insulted, or at least a little slighted, that he's a "this", that his total lack of memories, the way he's had to rebuild a life from scratch, has been reduced to one short word; half a word, even, if both he and John were included in the "this".

"Is this it?" John says, from where he is standing by the window. Rodney didn't see him move away, wonders if it was done on purpose, if John is already trying to put distance between them, if there is a part of him that remembers the alien protocol that's designed to keep them separate. John's looking down into a box on a table, and his face is creased with discomfort, or possibly just irritation (with John, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference).

"That's it," Colonel Carter says tiredly.

"Doesn't look like much," John says, and reaches out to touch it.

Several things happen simultaneously. Teyla starts forward, saying, "John, perhaps you should not-" and Colonel Carter says, "I think it would be best if you didn't-" and Rodney gets a sick, sick feeling in his stomach, familiarity and apprehension twisted up around each other, because John's going to do something _stupid_ ; Rodney remembers this, remembers the feeling, even if he doesn't remember anything else. So while Teyla and Colonel Carter are saying, "perhaps you should not" and "it would be best if you didn't", Rodney is hurtling forward, reaching out a hand, yelling, "Don't touch it, you moron," but of course it is too late, because even Rodney's speech isn't quick enough when John gets an idea in his reckless, stupid head.

Then there is a wave, some kind of pulse that flickers around the edges of Rodney's vision and leaves him nauseous, his ears ringing, and when he can see again, John is collapsed on the floor, alien device wrapped in unresponsive fingers, and he is screaming.

"No," Rodney says desperately. "No, I've already done this. We've done this." But of course that doesn't make a difference. John is still on the floor, and the room has burst into motion and sound, voices loud and frantic, discordant and incomprehensible to Rodney's ears.

It's possible after a minute to sort the sounds out, to distinguish other voices over John's rasping scream, and that's the only way to stay sane, Rodney thinks, to tune John out and focus on everyone else. "Hold him down," Raku is shouting, and he is touching John with firm, practiced hands, placing something between John's teeth, then pulling Teyla down to the ground, guiding her hands to John's shoulders. "Get his legs!" This is to Major Lorne, who is on his knees too, wrapping strong, solid hands around John's ankles, holding his legs steady as he thrashes on the floor.

"Call a medic!" someone else is yelling: one of the other Administrators, Rodney thinks numbly.

Colonel Carter is busy too; her hand to her ear, she is yelling into the air. Seconds later the door burst open and the soldiers— _Marines_ , Rodney thinks suddenly _—_ explode into the room, weapons drawn.

"Soldiers are not going to be any help!" Raku says furiously. He is still on his knees next to John's writhing body, holding onto John's bucking hips. "They're only going to make things worse."

Rodney is inclined to agree. In his view, packs of men and women armed with automatic weapons never make any situation better, but John is still screaming, and the damn device is still clutched in his hands, and how come anyone hasn't tried to take it away from him? Rodney darts forward, intent on the device, but Colonel Carter is suddenly in his face, pushing him away, grim and determined. "Absolutely not," she says. "You've got the gene too."

"What gene?" Rodney asks wildly. "What are you talking about?"

But Colonel Carter doesn't answer because the terrible screaming has suddenly, mercifully stopped; John is limp on the floor now, the fine tremor running through his body the only indication he's alive. The device is lying innocuously on the floor, inert now. Raku, Rodney supposes, has managed to pry it from John's fingers, or perhaps it was Teyla.

"Turn him on his side," Raku says quietly. Teyla and Lorne help him do that, just in time, because a second later John draws in a deep, shuddering breath, gags, and throws up on the floor.

Liria is there with a towel of some sort. She passes it wordlessly to Raku, who cleans up the floor with quick efficiency John would have admired, if he wasn't mostly unconscious.

"How long?" Raku asks, and Liria gives some nonsense answer, units of time Rodney's unfamiliar with. Raku frowns. "That's too long," he says. "Where's the medic?"

"That was treatment?" Colonel Carter asks. If she was cold before, she is not any longer. Her eyes are fiery, fierce. "What effect is that going to have on him?"

"I have no idea," Raku says angrily. "I don't know if that was Treatment or not. Our mechanisms can not be self-activated in that manner. You are the one who told me our designs may have been corrupted, that the original intent of the device may have been very different."

"But if it was," Colonel Carter insists. Her hand, Rodney notices, is hovering around a small weapon she is carrying in a thigh holster. "If that was treatment, what will it do to him?"

"As I said, I don't _know_. If that indeed was a form of Treatment, it was his sixth. We have no experience with that. It may just erase his memory again. It may do more. Treatment has never worked correctly on John anyway. I have no way of knowing what this has done to him."

"He's bleeding," Rodney says, and everyone's eyes snap to him, then back to John, who'd been, for a short moment, forgotten in the face of accusations and defensiveness. "His nose is bleeding."

Raku is frowning fiercely, though it's unclear what, or who, he's angry at. He pulls a piece of cloth from somewhere in his robe and kneels to wipe the blood away gently from John's lip; gently, Rodney thinks, because Raku can't bear to see John hurt, or hurting. _Oh,_ Rodney thinks. _Oh, it's like that._ It's truly unwelcome as far as epiphanies go, to realize now that everything Raku has done for him, for them, has really been done for John, to get him out of the mines, to get him somewhere he could settle, to make him feel comfortable and well-treated. Raku rises again, folding the cloth neatly and placing it on his desk. His eyes don't stray from John's prone form and _god_ , _of **course** it's like that, _ Rodney thinks; how is it that he is just noticing this now? Resentment and irritation leap so easily to the surface that he knows he has been in this situation before; the need to yell at John for being stupid and reckless is equally matched by the need to point out how John's mournful obliviousness to his own attractiveness has gotten them into trouble _again_.

Although it's hard to say how Raku's stupid crush has done them any real harm. Without it John might still be languishing in the mines, and Rodney still a low-ranked lab technician, never having met.

That's a horrible thought, in retrospect, even though it hadn't happened. But it could have, so easily, if it'd been anyone else in charge of inmate assignments, like Liria, who, Rodney thinks uncharitably, has probably never had a crush on anybody in her life.

"It might be best this way," Raku is saying quietly. "He was not happy here. The past month in particular has been difficult. If he does not remember it-"

Colonel Carter answers with a neutral, "Perhaps," but that's wrong, so very, very wrong. John was miserable precisely because he couldn't remember anything except for the last month; having his memories ripped away again is not going to make him happier, even if it will make it easier for him in the long run when they get back to their home and they have to live apart.

Rodney actually feels bitter about it for a moment, takes the time to find and nurse some resentment. Because he remembers everything, every second since John first came to live with him, and it's not fair that John gets the luxury of forgetting the small piece of it he'd remembered, especially now that Rodney won't have any more chances to remind him, not without being petty and vindictive. He can see himself, stumbling over words, trying to explain, "It was like this ..." and John will stare at him, eyes wide and green and resentful, because why would John want to know this? And there's no way to explain it that won't make it sound wrong, no reason for John to believe him when he says John came to him willingly.

So Rodney won't tell him. He'll just tell him about the cooking, about the pizza and the soups and the ice cream, about the laundry, maybe, about the cleaning, but he won't talk about the single bedroom with the single bed; he won't talk about lazy mornings spent wrapped around each other, or long evenings spent in silence on the couch, legs tangled up together, reading and working and relaxing.

These are things that he now knows they shouldn't have had, but they did have them; losing them is already a pain like getting shot (not that Rodney has any practical experience with getting shot. He doesn't think), sharp and vivid and constant. Since that instant of realization, the moment when Lorne had looked askance at the solitary bed, Rodney's been steeling himself to losing the things that he's treasured most. It had been little consolation, but consolation of a sort, nonetheless, to know that John would feel the loss too, to some degree. There had been too much between them, even in a month, for John to shrug it off and pretend none of it had mattered. And maybe it's petty, but Rodney had been glad to know he wouldn't be alone in this, that even if he couldn't ever tell anyone, if they couldn't ever talk about it, at least he wouldn't be the only one who remembered.

Except now John's not going to remember any of it at all, and Rodney knows it would be selfish to tell him of things he shouldn't have had in the first place. But that doesn't make it hurt any less.

John coughs and moans and coughs again, curling in on himself for a second. Teyla is there, patting his hair, murmuring soft words, and Rodney is resentful towards her too, for being the one who gets to be there providing comfort. _You were there,_ John had said, _in my dreams_ , and maybe it had only been dreams about stick-fighting, but still, Rodney hadn't dreamed about anybody at all except for John.

When John's eyes flutter open, they're hazy and confused, fuzzy with classic post-Treatment bewilderment. He glances wildly around the room in incomprehension, stares at Teyla's hand on his arm, then up at her face, blinks at Lorne who is crouched down by his feet.

"You're okay," Rodney hears himself saying. "It's going to take a little while to explain."

John lets Teyla help him sit up, and he accepts the glass of water that Raku has procured from somewhere, turning his head discretely to spit the first few mouthfuls out into a basin. "I feel awful," he says groggily, rubbing at his nose. He looks startled to find blood on his fingertips. "But at least the buzzing's stopped."

Rodney's heart is suddenly in his throat. "Buzzing? John-"

"I told you it wasn't a headache, Rodney," John says irritably, but then he freezes, goes literally motionless, not even breathing. " _Rodney_."

At first, Rodney doesn't assign any particular significance to John's breathy, stunned repetition of his name. He's too preoccupied with the relief that John remembers him, that everything isn't lost after all. There's relief, too, that John is sitting up on his own, that even though he's pale and shocky looking, he's lucid, that he's not convulsing, that the bleeding from his nose is already stopping.

"You remember me," Rodney says, giddy with relief, the day's swift whipsaw of emotions making him dizzier still.

"I remember you," John says. Then, " _Rodney_ ," again, his voice filled with a strange intensity Rodney can't identify. John is many things, but intense is not one of them, has never been one of them in Rodney's experience.

Rodney crouches down so his head is level with John's. "What is it? What's wrong?"

John just shakes his head and says, "Nothing," the word a strangled lie that gets caught in his throat. He is staring at Rodney, his face still unnaturally pale, and Rodney thinks, "oh" and "damn."

"You remember what just happened?" Teyla asks. She sounds a little sick, and it _is_ sickening. The only good thing that can be said for Treatment is that the person who's been Treated never remembers it. But that's not what John means, Rodney knows. That's not what John means at all.

"I remember it," John says. "I remember-" _Everything,_ he doesn't say, but he doesn't need to. Watching him, it's like seeing puzzle pieces slot together behind his eyes, one after the other, comprehension dawning at dizzying speed.

John swallows, and very carefully places the glass of water he's been given onto the floor. "Major," he says to Lorne, "help me up."

"Yes, sir," Lorne says. He reaches out with one arm, and together they do a clumsy, lurching dance to get upright, John stumbling against Lorne, and Lorne steadying him with a gentle, "Careful, sir."

"It's all right," John says. "I'm sorry, Major."

"No need to-" Lorne starts, but he stops mid-sentence, because John, standing tall and steady, not listing or stumbling at all, has whirled around and is holding a gun to Raku's head.

"Give me one reason not to put a hole through your forehead," John snarls. "And make it a good one."

"John!" Rodney blurts out, in chorus with the rest of the room.

"One reason." John's fingers are tight around the barrel of the gun—the gun which he stole from Lorne, Rodney realizes, which means ... Rodney's not sure what, exactly, except that Lorne is careless with his sidearm, and John's a sneaky, shifty bastard when he wants to be.

"Colonel Sheppard," Colonel Carter says carefully, "stand down."

"They ripped our brains to shreds," John growls. He is white with fury. "Tied us down and cut out the parts of us they didn't like, tried to make us into people they could accept."

"No," Raku stutters. He is as pale as John was a moment ago, and shaking. Rodney feels a little sorry for him, because John has become unexpectedly terrifying, his lanky, casual demeanor replaced with this stark violent fury. Even after seeing John fight Elsha, even having recognized in John the want, the _love_ , of the fight, even so, Rodney would still have said John wasn't the type to kill wantonly. But John looks seconds away from it now, like he's fighting against the urge to do it, like every instinct in his body is telling him to pull the trigger on his purloined weapon, and to hell with the consequences.

"John," Rodney says carefully, because he's not sure how John will react, now that he's—god—gotten his memory back. John's got a lifetime of experiences to draw on all of a sudden, and Rodney's familiar with almost none of them. "It wasn't malicious."

"The hell it wasn't," John snarls. His arm is trembling slightly; not from fatigue, Rodney thinks, but from the effort not to shoot, and Rodney still doesn't know what "Jesus" means, but he says it now, fervently.

"Tell me again," John grinds out. "Tell me again that it's not torture, Raku. Say it to my face, now that I remember every fucking second of every fucking Treatment."

"That's not possible," Raku says. He looks like he's about to faint. Everyone else just looks startled. Rodney thinks maybe he was the only one who'd realized that John had gotten more than the last month of his life back. "Subjects are sedated—the devices sedate you-"

John laughs a very unpleasant laugh that has nothing of humor in it at all. He looks like he's coming undone, and this is one thing Rodney had never considered, that getting his memories back could be anything less than a blessing. "Is that what you tell yourselves so you can sleep at night? Or did you just never bother finding out for sure?"

Colonel Carter has moved, slowly and silently, to a position off to John's side. Better position to shoot him, Rodney thinks, sickly, because she's also afraid John's going to kill Raku, and she'll stop him, if necessary. Rodney doesn't want to think about what that says about John's past, that his boss is willing to shoot him. For whatever it's worth, neither Lorne nor any of the Marines have moved a muscle, which makes Rodney think John was worrying needlessly about his ability to command. Teyla has also not moved, though she is somehow tense and prepared, holding herself ready in a manner that makes her look simultaneously more casual and more frightening than either Colonel Carter or the Marines. (Rodney has a sudden auditory flash, his own voice saying, "Don't piss her off, Sheppard; she'll kick your ass out of the solar system.")

"The Administrators were very clear about that point, Colonel Sheppard," Colonel Carter says. Her voice is unnaturally calm. "Under ordinary circumstances, subjects are completely sedated prior to undergoing Treatment."

"It's not sedation," John spits out. His fingers shift around the barrel of the gun, twitching restlessly. "It's paralysis."

_No_ , Rodney thinks. _No_. Because if it's paralysis, if every prisoner in the compound who went through Treatment felt every instant of it—if _he_ went through Treatment awake and aware but unable to move or scream—does it make it any less of a torture if you can't remember it when it's over?

"No, no," Raku says weakly. Similar protests erupt from the other Administrators in the room, voices clamoring, _no_ , and, _you're wrong_ , and _that's not possible._

"Yes," John says. His voice is low and cruel. "You're conscious for the whole thing. You feel every last second of it." He stares at Raku with cold, lethal hatred. "But you knew that, didn't you? Subduers use the same technology. And we all know what it's like when someone's subdued."

"We didn't know," Raku says. Pleads. And because Rodney sees what John doesn't when Raku looks at John, Rodney's pretty sure Raku's telling the truth. Raku might be the kind of man who would knowingly torture somebody, especially if he didn't think they'd remember it, but he'd never do it to John. But John doesn't know that.

"Let's leave," Rodney says desperately. "Colonel Carter. Let's just leave. John doesn't really want to shoot him-" ("The fuck I don't," John says under his breath) "-and there's nothing else for us to gain by staying here."

"I'm more than ready to leave," Colonel Carter says carefully. "If Colonel Sheppard is willing to put down his weapon."

John holds position for a few more minutes, then lowers the gun with a curse, although his eyes never leave Raku's face while he does it. "Major Lorne," he says tightly, spinning around. He hands the weapon over, butt first. "You're getting sloppy."

"Yes sir," Lorne says blandly. "Won't happen again, Colonel."

"Make sure it doesn't," John says. His anger is biting, but it's not aimed at Lorne, and from the expression on Lorne's face, he understands that he's just the nearest target. _Right_ , Rodney thinks, _he knows this John better than I do._

John scrubs at his face for a second, looking worn and tired. Just a few minutes ago, he was convulsing on the floor, and a few minutes before that, he didn't know any of the people in the room. _He made pancakes this morning_ , Rodney thinks stupidly, _without any memories of these people at all._

"I need a minute," John says. "I need to talk to Rodney." He pulls Rodney to the side of the room, not out of anyone's sight, but far enough away to give them the illusion of privacy. So long as they keep their voices down, no one's going to overhear.

After only one look at John's grave and tentative expression, Rodney can guess what this is about, and boy, that didn't take long.

"I'm not going to say anything," he says, preempting the unbearably awkward conversation John's obviously about to initiate. "I wouldn't do anything to jeopardize your career. Frankly, it's a little disturbing to think that with your memories intact you're actually worried about that, but even if that's the kind of person I was before, it's not the kind of person I am now, and I can assure you-."

John raises an eyebrow. "Rodney, shut up," he says in a careful whisper. "Do you trust me?"

"No, no," Rodney whispers back. "You've got it backward." But then he looks down and sees the glint of metal of John's hand—the prototype, inert now, clenched tightly in John's fist, hidden from anyone else's eyes by the intimate bulk of John's body—and he gets an awful, nervous fluttering in his stomach. To John's question, Rodney wants to answer: "How can I trust you? I don't even know you." Because this John's a stranger to Rodney, intent and dangerous; he's not the same person who whispered promises into Rodney's ear in the dark. So, "You know me better than I do," is what Rodney actually says. "You tell me."

John's grin is brief and startling when it cuts across his face. "Right," he says. "You can't ... that's the problem." He sighs and runs his hand through his hair. "I would never intentionally hurt you."

"Not that I mean to sound skeptical," Rodney says, although he knows that's exactly how he sounds, and the fact that John would never _intentionally_ hurt him is not quite as comforting as John presumably means it be, "but that's what _they_ said."

"Yeah," John says, "I know. But they didn't know what they were doing, and I do."

"Okay," Rodney says, "now I do mean to sound skeptical. If you expect me to believe that having your memory miraculously and, need I remind you, quite painfully restored has somehow given you the knowledge and ability to use some centuries old alien device-"

John huffs a laugh which sounds only a little bit ragged. "It's weird how little you've changed."

Rodney frowns at that, but John doesn't elaborate. "While I appreciate your desire to restore me to the same unamnesiac state you've achieved, and in fact I share your enthusiasm for that goal, I think it's possible your impatience is misplaced. I," he says, letting his eyes drift down towards the device in John's hand, "am thinking heavy sedation. Real sedation. The kind that leaves you very, very unconscious."

"Yeah, I know," John says. Even whispering, he sounds frustrated. He takes a quick look over his shoulder at Colonel Carter, who is doing a poor job of making small talk with a very shaken Raku while the Marines are standing around looking threatening, clutching their weapons in a very obvious display of passive aggression. "We could do that," John says. "We could leave, and go back to Atlantis, and let Radek hunt through the database, and have Keller run scans and do tests, and it will be _weeks_ before we're back here, and by then who knows if Liria and her cronies will even let us back past the shield. No." John lowers his voice further. "If you want to make sure, then we do it now. It won't take long."

"I-" The worst of it is, Rodney wants to say yes. He does trust John, at least the part of John that he knows, and he really, really wants his memories back now that he knows they are literally just a flick of a switch away. But the room's still reeking from the sour stench of John's vomit, and there are splatters of blood staining the front of his shirt, and Rodney's not sure he trusts John _that_ much, or that he wants his memories back _that_ badly.

"Rodney." John places his fingers on Rodney's arm. The warmth soaks through his sleeve like a kinetic transfer. "Rodney, it's going to be okay. I promise. I'll even let you yell at me later for being a reckless moron."

"As enticing as that sounds," Rodney begins, "I could do that without risking neural dismemberment."

"No one's getting dismembered," John says. " _Please_ , Rodney." His fingers tighten on Rodney's arm, willing Rodney to trust him, just enough, and Rodney thinks that while John is often evasive and occasionally shifty, he's never lied to his face.

"Okay," Rodney says. "But I swear to whatever gods we are supposed to believe in, if this is excruciatingly painful, I am going to make your life a living hell."

John laughs again. "Really," he says, "it's _amazing_ how little you've changed."

Then he shifts position subtly, transfers the device from one hand to the next, and all Rodney has time to whisper is, "Living hell. I mean it," before the world washes away in a soothing ocean of white. 

 ~~

What with one thing or another, Rodney doesn't see John for nearly a full day after they arrive back on Atlantis. His quarters have been reassigned, and his possessions sent back to Earth, so he's sitting on the bed in empty guest quarters, reading through e-mail. Approximately a thousand people have been by to see him; after the first several dozen, he stopped answering the door chime.

His e-mail account, which, mysteriously, was never deactivated, is straining under the weight of ten thousand unread e-mails, the most interesting of which contain morbid speculation as to his fate. Some of the guesses were scarily accurate, though he is going to have to talk to Simpson about her obsession with putting him in shackles and a sarong.

The door chime rings. Rodney continues to ignore it. He's got enough MREs to last him a few days, and he's already talked with Carter and Radek and had a manly bonding session with Ronon that involved a lot of grunting and hearty punches on the shoulder. Frankly, there is no one else he cares enough to see that he is willing to suffer the endless repetition of the short story of the last eight months of his life. He is considering writing a blast e-mail, just to end the torture.

The door chimes again, and after another minute, the unwanted visitor starts to pound. "Rodney, open up. It's John."

Rodney thinks the doors open without getting up from his chair. "Obviously I never realized how much I missed that," he says as the door slides smoothly open and John steps in, "but I really missed that."

"What, the doors?" John nods as he steps in and the doors shut behind him.

"And the lights," Rodney says. "You don't think it's such a hassle to get out of bed to turn off the light until you don't have to do it anymore."

"Rodney," John says, quirking an eyebrow, "you always made me turn out the lights."

This is true, but, "Only when you were there," Rodney says. "There were lots of nights when you weren't."

"Must have been tough." John settles comfortably against the doorframe. He looks around the empty room. "Sent your stuff back, too, huh?"

"It would have been foolish of them to send your things back and leave mine here. I just hope Jeannie didn't actually go through them yet and throw anything out."

"I'm sure the boxes are sitting in her garage," John says. He is still standing in the doorway, literally in the doorway, so he is not as comfortable as he appears. "When did they let you out of the infirmary?"

"Ha," Rodney says. "Keller didn't even keep me overnight. As homecomings go, it was a bit anticlimactic."

"Yeah," John says. He rubs at the back of his neck. "It's probably the first time I've ever come back after being held prisoner that I'm not malnourished and dehydrated." He pulls at his tee shirt ruefully, which is resting tightly over his stomach. "I think I've gained a couple of pounds, actually. All that pizza and ice cream."

"You still have your boyish figure," Rodney says, rolling his eyes. "I'm a little surprised to see _you_ out so soon. I would have thought Keller would have kept you for a couple of days, at least. What with the whole writhing on the floor in convulsions and all."

"Yeah," John says, wincing. "I definitely think you got the better deal there."

"You mean the part where I was spared the agonizing manual reconnections of all my severed neural pathways?"

"Yeah," John says. "It's too bad I couldn't have figured out how to reset the damn thing _before_ I picked it up."

"Better late than never. And at least we know now why the Treatments never really worked on you."

"Good ol' ATA gene. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking."

"Okay," Rodney says. "Now that we're home, feel free to stop dropping inanities like that into conversation."

John looks like he wants to say something nasty, or maybe just give Rodney the finger, but he doesn't say anything at all, like he's remembered that he's not supposed to be relaxed in here, that they don't actually have that kind of relationship.

Rodney picks at his blanket uncomfortably. "Do you have all your memories back?"

John's lips quirk up in a smile. "I think so. But I wouldn't know if any were missing, would I?"

"I suppose not. Although I've been testing. Just to make sure."

"Testing?" John finally walks into the room. He stops by the desk and pulls out a chair, straddling it backwards, crossing his arms on the chair back and resting his chin on them. He looks settled in for the long haul, but Rodney knows him well enough know to see how tense he still is. "How do you mean?"

"Oh, you know," Rodney says, waving a hand about. "Going through the name of all my teachers from grammar school on. Listing the courses I took in university. People I've dated. That sort of thing. I haven't found any obvious gaps."

"Huh," John says. "I'll have to try that."

"Yes." And then Rodney's quiet, and it's incredibly awkward again, and Rodney hates hates _hates_ this. "Okay," he says, finally. "Look. We have to talk about this, and I might as well be the first to jump in and apologize."

John sighs. "I think we should just agree not to apologize for anything we did or said there. Trust me, in the long run, we'll both be happier."

"No, no. I'm serious. Look, I understand that sexuality can be very fluid and situational, especially when removed from artificial societal constraints, but now that we've got our memories back it's perfectly natural that we're uncomfortable remembering what ... what we ... did." He waves his hand around vaguely. "Particularly under the circumstances, with the whole master/servant thing, though I think you should remember that I did ask if you felt you had to do it because it was your job and you said no."

"Wow," John says. "Okay. You've put more thought into this than I have, obviously. I was kind of ready to stay on the whole not apologizing tack."

"By which you mean, not talking about it."

"Possibly," John admits. "I find that not talking about things is generally the most effective strategy for coping with things you'd rather not deal with. But look. About the whole servant thing, I want you to know that I'm fine with it. I'm not going to hold it over you, or resent you for it or anything." He fidgets with the back of his chair. "In case, you know, you were worrying about that."

"I wasn't worrying about that," Rodney lies.

"And that would be lie number one for the night," John says with a sigh.

"Okay, I was worrying. I had you making me pie and cleaning my toilets, John."

John rolls his eyes. "Yes, you did. And don't get me wrong, I hated it, and I'm never going to do it again. Ever. For, like, the rest of my life. But I didn't blame _you_ for it. You made it perfectly clear you never wanted a servant, and I never once felt that you abused your position. Even with the whole sex thing. Maybe especially with the whole sex thing."

Rodney peers at him. "Really?"

"Really. You never took advantage. I appreciated it. I still appreciate it."

"Okay. That's good. Seriously, that's very good. That ... that helps quite a lot, actually. But there's still the whole awkward unintentional homosexual relationship issue. Which, obviously, I will never tell anyone else about. Although Teyla and Lorne suspect. But I won't do anything to confirm it, so I don't think you have to worry-"

"I'm not worrying, Rodney." John looks away. The tips of his ears are bright red. "Look, when we ... started. At the beginning, when I first started living with you, and we ... you know. I wasn't ... I mean, obviously, I wasn't a virgin. With guys."

"Well, no," Rodney says. "After a couple of months in the mines—I did some reading when we were there, and they actually encourage sexual relationships among the lower ranked inmates, did you know that? Lots of them. In all sorts of combinations, so long as they're not exclusive, because exclusivity leads to jealousy leads to violence, which is exactly what they're trying to avoid. Honestly, it would have been more surprising if you _had_ been a virgin, under the circumstances."

"Yeah," John says uncomfortably. "Okay. But Rodney-"

"No, no, you don't need to say anything else," Rodney says hurriedly. "Like I said, I understand that sexuality is situational. That was then, and you had no memory, but you're here now and you remember that you're straight and that's completely fine. I'm not going to ... to remind you, or anything like that. I won't bring it up ever again. If I could forget it, I would, but even though I can't, I can still _act_ like I've forgotten it."

John frowns. "Rodney. I don't think you're-" He sighs, and rubs the back of his neck again. "You're not understanding what I'm saying."

"No, I am. Really. You're not gay, or bi. I get that. I just hope it's not going to make you so uncomfortable that you can't work with me, because honestly, I think that would be the worst possible outcome."

"Of course I can still work with you! Jesus." John looks exasperated, then determined. "Look. Like you said. Sexuality. It's situational, but mine wasn't. There. I mean, it wasn't dependent on that situation."

Rodney opens his mouth to protest, then snaps it shut. He blinks. "What?"

"I wasn't a virgin with guys, Rodney. Not when I came to your apartment, not when they threw me in the mines."

"Did you ... you mean, in the quarry? You weren't there very long ... oh, my god, did they _force_ you? Did you tell Keller? Did she check—well, okay, obviously there wouldn't be any physical damage, or I think I would have noticed, but still, if they forced you-"

"No one forced me! God, you are incredibly dense for a genius sometimes." John drops his head to his forearms and mumbles, "Nothing happened in the quarry."

"But you said-"

"I said I wasn't a virgin with guys when they threw me in the mines. I wasn't even before we got to the planet."

Rodney gapes just a little. Really. Just the tiniest little bit, which he thinks is completely called for under the circumstances. "You. What?"

"Okay, you don't get to freak out about this, after all your "sexuality is fluid" crap," John says, lifting his head back up and glaring, the effect of which is ruined by his flaming red cheeks. "It's just, I don't want you to think you took advantage of me. Or that I'm disgusted by it, or anything. It's fine. What we did was fine. You didn't make me do anything I hadn't already done before. All right?"

Despite his words, John looks profoundly uncomfortable, and Rodney considers for a minute that's he lying just to make Rodney feel better, that some facet of his need to serve and please has carried over. But then he thinks, no, because John's a terrible liar, and he wouldn't be able to make his ears go all red unless he was genuinely embarrassed.

"First of all," Rodney says carefully, "sexuality _is_ fluid. That is fact, not crap. Second of all, I believe I have already assured you I am not uncomfortable. I am far, far from uncomfortable. I was trying to make sure _you_ were not uncomfortable."

"Okay," John says suspiciously. "So you're not uncomfortable and I'm not uncomfortable."

"Right. We're both very comfortable. Never mind the fact that you look about as uncomfortable as is humanly possible."

"I'm not uncomfortable."

"Okay," Rodney says smugly. "That is lie number two for the night. You are _completely_ uncomfortable."

"I'm not uncomfortable!" John shoots back irritably. "I'm disconcerted."

"Why? Is it the fact that we're both bisexual? Because honestly, I think there's a much, much higher proportion of bisexuals on this expedition than in the general population, at least among those of us who came through in the first wave. One-way mission. We're all a little bit off from accepted social norms. It's a little bit surprising that neither of us realized it about the other, although obviously it wasn't anything you in particular were going to be flaunting, and I personally feel sexuality is a private matter that doesn't need to be advertised, and what are you laughing about?"

"Nothing," John says through the laughter. "It's just, I used to wonder if Treatment had somehow made you talk that fast. When I first started working for you especially. I couldn't believe how many words you managed to pack into one breath."

"That's only because you pack so few in. And is that it? You're freaked out because we're both bi?"

"I dealt with my sexuality about twenty years ago. I'm freaked out because we were involved, Rodney. And it was _working_. And I liked you. A lot."

"I liked you too," Rodney says. "Way more than I should have, under the circumstances. I let myself get attached and now I don't exactly know what to do about it, because you've got your job, and-"

But then John is off his chair and kissing him, muttering nonsense against his lips, and this is all at once familiar and utterly brand new. "I just want you to know," John murmurs, as he slides his fingers up and under Rodney's sweater, "I meant what I said about not cleaning your toilets ever again."

"John," Rodney answers, already losing the capability of rational thought and coherent speech and that's really fine with him because—home! With John!—"we live in Atlantis. The toilets clean themselves." 


End file.
